Organizer of Pope’s Anti-Abuse Summit Terms It ‘Partly A Success’

LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Tablet

March 28, 2019

By Christopher White

A member of the organizing committee for February’s Vatican sex abuse summit has dubbed the meeting “partly a success,” saying it achieved his main goal of bringing about “unity for the whole church leadership that was present.”

Father Hans Zollner, S.J., head of Rome’s Center for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University, said that 2018 was a “year of change” in the Church’s understanding of the global sex abuse crisis and that “we are at another level of awareness.”

In reference to cardinals now under scrutiny for mishandling abuse cases, or for abuse itself, Father Zollner said “untouchables have become touchable and are facing prison sentences,” adding that the Church has been greatly influenced by the “Me Too” movement,” which has caused a cultural awakening on issues of abuse of power and sexual misconduct.

Father Zollner’s remarks were delivered March 26 during a discussion on “Reckoning and Reform: New Frontiers on the Clergy Abuse Crisis,” hosted by Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, which also included a presentation by John Jay College researchers Karen Terry and Margaret Smith on new developments and data in their efforts to study the roots and extent of the abuse crisis.

The German Jesuit priest, appointed by Pope Francis as one of the organizers of the summit which brought together the heads of every bishops’ conference around the globe, said that in surveying the U.S. Catholic Church, the country is “in some state of what Saint Ignatius termed ‘spiritual desolation’ – a decrease of faith, hope, and love,” suffering a severe loss of trust in the Church over the issue of abuse.

Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.