ROME (ITALY)
Catholic News Service
February 21, 2019
By Junno Arocho Esteves
“Every time I refused to have sex with him, he would beat me,” an abuse survivor from Africa told Pope Francis and bishops attending the Vatican summit on child protection and the abuse crisis.
The meeting began Feb. 21 with the harrowing stories of survivors of sexual abuse, cover-up and rejection by church officials.
The pre-recorded testimonies of five survivors were broadcast in the synod hall; the Vatican did not disclose their names, but only whether they were male or female and their country of origin.
In the first testimony, a man from Chile expressed the pain he felt when, after reporting his abuse to the church, he was treated “as a liar” and told that “I and others were enemies of the church.”
“You are physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed — in some cases — into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith,” he said.
Comparing the abuse crisis to a cancer in the church, the survivor said that “it is not enough to remove the tumor and that’s it,” but there must be measures to “treat the whole cancer.”
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