MALTA
Malta Today
October 14, 2019
by Raphael Vassallo
Rocked by over a decade of child abuse scandals, the Catholic Church is in the process of renewing its structures and policies. Fr Aaron Zahra – abbot of the Dominican Priory in Vittoriosa, and author of a dissertation about sex abuse in Catholic schools – argues that the Church has a lot to learn from its past mistakes
Recently, you wrote an opinion piece criticising the Church for its mishandling of the international child abuse scandals of recent years. How seriously do you think this issue has dented the credibility of the Church, both globally and locally?
Let’s start with this: when it came to cases of abuse of minors by priests and members of religious orders, the Church thought it could grab the bull by the horns by keeping everything behind closed doors because it gave more importance to its own reputation on the outside, than to the good of the victims. The Church’s priority was, so to speak, to sweep everything under the carpet; and to safeguard the reputation of the priesthood, so that the figure of the priest would be kept on a pedestal as ‘a man of God’… as if priests were, by definition, incapable of doing such things.
Meanwhile, as far as the victims were concerned… it was as though the Church used them to glean information about what happened; and then stopped there. Even worse than that, I have heard of many cases where victims were even offered money to keep their mouths shut. Or where perpetrators were transferred to other parishes, where they continued to abuse other victims… It’s a bit like playing chess: you move your pieces around on the board… as if the abuse will stop happening, once the perpetrator is in a different place.
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