ROME (ITALY)
Crux
Dec. 14, 2019
By Inés San Martín
He is both one of the quietest Vatican officials, and one of the Roman Curia’s least known personalities. He is a member of the team that handles the allegations of clerical sexual abuse that arrive in Rome, and he played a key role in the shakeup of the Catholic Church in Chile which has been ravaged by a clerical abuse crisis.
This means that on the rare occasions Spanish Father Jordi Bertomeu speaks, his words have weight. He did so at length this week in a 2,800-word essay published by the Spanish magazine Palabra, where he discusses the role the hot button topics of celibacy, the Church’s ban on the ordination of women, and homosexuality have on the abuse of children.
In short, none: He argues being celibate, being a man or being gay does not make a person a sexual abuser.
Last year, the Spaniard was tapped by Pope Francis to head to Chile with Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, another member of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), to try to understand the situation regarding clerical sexual abuse in the country. The result was a document thousands of pages long that led to the resignation of the entire episcopate; to date, the pontiff has accepted eight.
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