ROME
National Catholic Reporter
June 11, 2018
By Joshua J. McElwee
Pope Francis has accepted the resignation of the Catholic bishop at the center of Chile’s clergy sexual abuse crisis, in the first of what is expected to be a wave of firings to root out what the pontiff has termed a “culture of abuse and cover-up” in the country’s church.
In a short note June 11, the Vatican said simply that Francis had accepted the resignation of Osorno Bishop Juan Barros Madrid, a controversial prelate who had been accused of covering up abuse by another priest in the 1980s and ’90s.
At the same time, the pope accepted the resignations of two other Chilean prelates who had already reached the traditional retirement age of 75. Francis has named separate apostolic administrators to lead each of the three dioceses on a temporary basis.
Barros’ resignation appears to wrap up one part of what has been an unusually tumultuous period in Francis’ five-year papacy, which touched off during a January visit to Chile when the pontiff enraged abuse survivors and their advocates by calling the accusations against Barros “calumny.”
The pope however made a sharp turnabout after the visit abroad, sending one of the church’s most respected abuse investigators to Chile to look into the accusations against Osorno’s bishop. In a letter to the country’s bishops in April after receiving a 2,300-page report on the situation, Francis admitted making “serious mistakes” in his handling of sexual abuse cases in Chile.
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