SYDNEY (AUSTRALIA)
Australian Broadcasting Company
July 15, 2019
By Alan Weedon
The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, running from 2013 to 2017, found that 7 per cent of all Australian priests — or 1,880 alleged perpetrators — were accused of child sexual abuse between 1950 and 2010.
It determined that the Australian Church was responsible for “catastrophic failures of leadership” over decades, where civil authorities were actively kept away from numerous allegations of abuse in parishes around the country.
For survivors of child sexual abuse, reading the details of crimes can provoke a wide range of emotions. We spoke to experts about how to deal with triggering, traumatic news.
In March 2019, one of the Vatican’s highest-ranked officials, Cardinal George Pell, was prosecuted for the sexual abuse of two choirboys, which seemed to mark an apex in Australia’s civil reckoning of the clergy’s crimes.
However, for Frédéric Martel, a French journalist and author, the prosecution of Pell is just the tip of a global iceberg.
“When I was in Australia some people asked, ‘Is the world speaking about Pell?’, and I said no,” Martel told the ABC.
“Pell is one symptom among many others.”
Earlier this year, Martel released In the Closet of the Vatican: Power, Homosexuality, Hypocrisy, a book that maps the presence of homosexuality within the Catholic Church’s patriarchal hierarchy.
While it speculates that about 80 per cent of clergy are homosexual — who may or may not act on their desires — the process of writing the book put Martel up against some of the clergy’s most egregious crimes.
When he looked into the Latin American Church’s late-20th century history, a picture of regional fiefdoms quickly emerged, with Mexico’s Marcial Maciel telling one of the Church’s darkest stories.
Maciel was the founder of the Legionaries of Christ order in 1941 — a group praised by Pope John Paul II for bringing in a record number of seminarians and money into Church coffers.
But by the end of century, Maciel would be accused of numerous instances of sexual abuse against children and his seminarians that stretched over decades.
By 2010, the Legionaries acknowledged that he had fathered a child with a long-term partner.
In the weeks after the official disclosure, a Mexican attorney alleged that Maciel fathered up to six children, after being asked to litigate on behalf of three of them.
Theology professor and Church historian Massimo Faggioli, who has written extensively about the Church’s sexual abuse crisis, told the ABC that cases like Maciel’s were the product of a time when the protection and growth of the Catholic brand was paramount.
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