LONDON (ENGLAND)
February 26, 2019
By Joanna Moorhead
In Rome, some commentators describe the child abuse scandal as the worst crisis to hit the Catholic church since the Reformation. That’s way wide of the mark: the current situation, which was the focus last week of a four-day summit of Catholic leaders from across the world, is far worse than the fallout from the emergence of Protestantism 500 years ago. This is a true day of reckoning, and whatever theologians are saying about the ability of this institution to have survived 2,000 years of turbulent history, the stakes have never been higher.
So you might have thought there would be only one topic on the agenda at the thousands of Catholic parishes in the UK last weekend; or even that the organisation’s churches would be empty, with the so-called faithful staying away in disgust. After all, the event in Rome cracked open the sad and sorry depths to which the church has sunk. Pope Francis and 190 leaders, mostly pink- and red-skullcapped prelates and cardinals (they certainly know how to dress up, even if they don’t know how to behave) listened in stunned silence to testimonies, including one from an African woman who relayed her experience of being raped by a priest throughout her teens: three times she got pregnant, and three times he forced her to have an abortion.
Another survivor from Chile said the church’s leaders had discredited victims and protected the priests who abused them, while a Nigerian nun, Sister Veronica Openibo, called out the church’s leadership for its hypocrisy in parading themselves as the custodians of moral values, while covering up atrocities that blighted the lives of the most vulnerable members of its community. Meanwhile one of the pope’s most trusted advisers, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, admitted that files documenting abuse had been “either destroyed or never created”.
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