UNITED STATES
Bishop-Accountability.org
June 7, 2018
On May 18, 2018, at the end of their week-long summit with Pope Francis, all 31 active bishops in Chile submitted their resignations, a collective acknowledgement of the Chilean church’s “deplorable” handling of child sex abuse by clergy.
In a ten-page document the Pope gave to each bishop, he said their treatment of the “open wound” of abuse had caused it to “deepen more in its thickness and pain.” In the document’s footnotes, he detailed some of the “grave defects” that his investigators had found in the bishops’ management of abuse: minimizing serious crimes as mere moral faults; “recklessly” entrusting abusers with renewed access to minors; ignoring red flags and “superficially” classifying complaints as “improbable”; delaying investigating or doing no investigation at all; and destroying documents. Such practices are “reprehensible,” the pope wrote.
Two weeks later, Pope Francis issued another extraordinary pronouncement, this one a letter to the Catholic people of Chile in which he declared “‘never again’ to the culture of abuse and the system of cover-up that allows it to perpetuate …”
It was the first recognition by any pope of the systemic cover-up of child sex abuse in the church.
Now a pressing question emerges: will the pope extend this scrutiny to countries beyond Chile? As dangerous as its practices have been, the Chilean church is not atypical. We see the same cover-up of abusive priests today, the same disregard for victims, in the Catholic churches of Argentina, the Philippines, Poland, and the United States, as seen most recently in the Diocese of Buffalo NY. Change is occurring in Chile only because that situation caused a public relations debacle for the Pope himself.
The most meaningful measure of the Pope’s commitment to “never again” will be whether he systematically investigates mishandling of abuse cases by bishops and religious superiors throughout the universal Church.
To deepen understanding of the challenge facing Pope Francis, BishopAccountability.org presents this sample list of current bishops whose responses to allegations and to victims raise questions about their fitness for office. None has yet been disciplined by the pope.
Our list includes five cardinals, two of whom belong to the Pope’s inner circle of advisors. Their inclusion in this list of alleged child-protection violators underscores both the difficulty and urgent necessity of the task facing the Pope. Disciplining such influential friends will be difficult, but for Pope Francis to make good on his promise, accountability must begin at the top. Diocesan bishops cannot be expected to comply with standards that cardinals close to the pope are ignoring with impunity.
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