NEW YORK (NY)
Commonweal
Feb 12, 2019
By Austen Ivereigh
Pope Lowers Expectations for Next Month’s Sex Abuse Summit — the Associated Press headline may not have been heart-lifting, but it was fair. During Pope Francis’ flight back from Panama on January 27, he had told reporters that “we have to deflate the expectations” surrounding the bishops’ first global summit on clerical sex abuse, which is to take place at the Vatican between February 20 and February 24.
Francis described the summit as essentially a “catechesis”: to make church leaders across the world aware of the pain of victims, and their obligations to act against abuser priests, as well as to hear survivors’ testimonies and to pray, penitentially, for the church’s failures. But three days is not a long time, and no one is expecting a revolution. “The problem of abuse will continue,” Francis assured reporters. “It’s a human problem.” No one should be expecting the pope to pull a new solution out of a top hat.
As the Vatican’s press-office director, Alessandro Gisotti, points out, the Vatican meeting is only the latest stage in a long-maturing response. If you thought this was just Rome’s attempt to seize the initiative after the Pennsylvania grand-jury report or the Cardinal McCarrick scandal, forget it. The Vatican’s editorial director, Andrea Tornielli, insists that the issue will be looked at from a “global perspective,” not “solely European and American.”
This is just as much about Africa and Asia and Latin America, where they don’t think they have an abuse crisis, but they do.Still, while Francis may have wanted to “deflate” expectations, he was not saying the meeting does not matter. He thinks it matters very much—just not in the way people might think it does. Before talking about new protocols and procedures, the pope said on the plane, there is something else the bishops have to do: “We must become aware.”
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