UNITED STATES
Religion News Service
By Mark Silk
On Wednesday, Pope Francis issued a letter of apology to the bishops of Chile for his handling of the their country’s sex abuse crisis. It is an extraordinary document whose significance can hardly be exaggerated.
When Francis visited Chile in January, he was widely expected to calm the ongoing furor over Juan Barros Madrid. Instead, he intensified it.
Barros was a follower of Francisco Karadima, a charismatic priest whom the Vatican defrocked in 2011 for abusing teenagers during the 1980s and 1990s. Despite accusations by several of Karadima’s victims that Barros had been present for some of the abuse and failed to report it—and over the objections of Chile’s bishops—Francis went ahead and appointed him bishop of the southern Chilean city of Osorno in 2015. As the case festered, Barros twice offered, and Francis twice refused to accept, his resignation.
In January, he rubbed salt into the wound by celebrating Mass with Barros and calling the charges against him “calumny.” Although he retracted the comment after it provoked outrage, he insisted that he believed in Barros’ innocence. His apparent dismissal of credible evidence stunned even his staunchest supporters.
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