ROME (ITALY)
Crux
January 15, 2019
By Inés San Martín
According to an Italian historian who presides over a monthly Vatican magazine on women, both women and clerical sexual abuse are problems that will continue to dog Pope Francis until they’re resolved.
“[A] question arises, that of women who are nonexistent and invisible in the eyes of ecclesiastical hierarchies, accustomed to taking their service for granted,” Lucetta Scaraffia wrote in a recent op-ed for the Spanish newspaper El Pais. “Today religious [women] no longer accept shameful conditions of exploitation and humiliation.”
According to Scaraffia, during the first years of his pontificate, Francis led a revolution in the life of the Church, which in previous years had focused too much on bioethics. She called those issues “difficult and risky to face, and before which the Church, whose position always seemed very rigid, didn’t always succeed in presenting herself as a defender of the weak.”
In the piece published on Monday, Scaraffia also wrote that Francis put the poor back at the center of the Church’s core concerns, represented mainly by migrants, but also the “inhabitants of the most miserable areas of the third world, oppressed by misery and ecological disasters.”
He also extended the “mercy of the Church to those who, after [the end of their first] marriage, had formed a new family, as well as women who asked for forgiveness for the sin of abortion, and who until [the pope’s] providential intervention had to go to a bishop to obtain absolution.”
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