ROME (ITALY)
Associated Press
February 20, 2019
By Nicole Winfield
If Pope Francis needed a concrete example to justify summoning church leaders from around the globe to Rome for a tutorial on clergy sex abuse, Sister Bernardine Pemii has it.
The nun, who recently completed a course on child protection at Rome’s Jesuit university, has been advising her bishop in Ghana on an abuse case, instructing him to invite the victim to his office to hear her story before opening an investigation. But what if Pemii hadn’t stepped in?
“It would have been covered (up). There would have been complete silence,” Pemii told The Associated Press. “And nothing would have happened. Nobody would have listened to the victim.”
Starting Thursday, Francis is convening a summit at the Vatican to prevent cover-ups of sex abuse by Catholic superiors everywhere. The gathering comes as many Catholic bishops and authorities around the world still try to protect the church’s reputation at all costs, denying that priests rape children and discrediting victims even as new abuse cases keep coming to light.
Francis, history’s first Latin American pope, has made many of the same mistakes. As archbishop in Buenos Aires, he went out of his way to defend a famous street priest who was later convicted of abuse. He also took a handful of measures early on in his papacy that undermined progress the Vatican had made in taking a hard line against rapists.
These include the pontiff publicly botching a well-known sex abuse cover-up case in Chile by initially giving it no credence. But Francis realized last year he had erred. “I was part of the problem,” Francis told Chilean survivor Juan Carlos Cruz during a private meeting at the Vatican in June.
The pope has now done an about-face and is bringing the rest of the church leadership along with him at the extraordinary summit. Some 190 presidents of bishops’ conferences, religious orders and Vatican offices are gathering for four days of lectures and workshops on preventing sex abuse in their churches, tending to victims and investigating abuse when it does occur.
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