ROME (ITALY)
Washington Post
February 23, 2019
By Chico Harlan
When Benjamin Kitobo arrived in Rome this week along with more than 100 other survivors of clerical sexual abuse from around the world, something quickly stood out. He was the only victim he could find representing a country in Africa.
“In some places, it is still life-threatening to speak out,” said Kitobo, 51, who says he was abused by a priest in the Congo, known then as Zaire. Kitobo now works as a nurse in St. Louis.
But Kitobo — and, increasingly, Vatican leaders — say that in many parts of the vast Catholic empire, the scale of clerical sexual abuse probably far exceeds what is publicly known.
Some go so far as to describe Pope Francis’s landmark four-day summit on child protection, which ends Sunday, as a direct warning for Catholic authorities across Asia, Africa and other parts of the world where abuse scandals have not yet left a searing mark.
They say the next decades of the Catholic Church’s efforts against clerical abuse depend on whether those countries can be pushed to take safeguarding measures preemptively, rather than responding only after a crisis explodes into the open.
“No bishop may say to himself, ‘This problem of abuse in the church does not concern me because things are different in my part of the world,’ ” Cardinal Oswald Gracias, the archbishop of Mumbai, who has been criticized for his own handling of cases, told the Vatican gathering of 190 bishops and other Catholic leaders. “I dare say there are cases all over the world, also in Asia, also in Africa.”
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