ROME
CRUX
June 1, 2018
By Inés San Martín
German Jesuit Father Hans Zollner is widely recognized as one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on the fight against child sexual abuse. Zollner heads the Centre for Child Protection at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University and is a member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
Recently, Crux sat down with Zollner to discuss the sexual abuse crisis playing out in the Church in Chile, and how to understand the dynamics that made the crisis possible.
Among other points, Zollner stressed that at bottom, sexual abuse is not a “liberal v. conservative” issue, while adding that the clericalist attitudes which can underlie abuse sometimes, as in the Chilean case, flourish best in a traditional, strongly conservative milieu.
“What we’ve seen in the Karadima case especially is a very moralistic approach, which bizarrely, is then combined with an absolutely immoral approach to people,” he said. “Some of those who purport to defend the Church and her doctrine behave in a blatantly contradictory way, thereby destroying the credibility of the Church.”
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