UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
This week, as Carnival was in full swing in many Catholic regions of the world and as the body of Padre Pio was paraded in Rome in a glass coffin, things appear to have gone from bad to worse in news of the response of Catholic officials to the abuse crisis. Patricia Miller sums up the response of many thinking Catholics (and non-Catholic observers) to the papal abuse commission’s recent silencing of Peter Saunders by noting that “[f]or abuse survivors, the move to silence Saunders confirms their fears that the commission was largely a PR tactic.”
In an editorial statement yesterday, the New York Times took note of Saunders’s sacking by the abuse commission (and of Pope Francis’s failure to attend the recent Vatican screening of “Spotlight,” something Saunders made public right before he was voted off the commission). The Times notes that the Vatican could learn a valuable lesson about accountability from “Spotlight.”
Then it adds:
Hierarchical accountability remains a pressing issue that the Vatican has not fully confronted in the numerous dioceses of the world where the scandal was suppressed. The pope’s 17-member commission presented fresh evidence of this failing when one of its two abuse-victim members, who had gone to the news media to criticize the slow pace of its work, was suddenly suspended on Saturday in a commission vote of no confidence.
For the Daily Beast, Barbie Latza Nadeau cites the response of SNAP leader David Clohessy to what has just happened to Saunders:
“The Pope’s abuse panel will issue recommendations. The Pope will adopt them. And nothing will improve. Why? Because there will be no enforcement,” says David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused By Priests, called SNAP. “Why? Because the church hierarchy is an entitled, rigid, secretive, all-male monarchy. No new protocols or policies or procedures will radically undo a centuries-old self-serving structure that rewards clerics who keep a tight lid on child sex crimes and cover-ups.”
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