UNITED STATES
Christian Catholicism
Jerry Slevin
Outrage against current mass violence is courageous. Outrage against historical mass violence is less courageous. Selective outrage, however, is hypocrisy. Pope Francis vented calculatingly this week against 100 year old mass atrocities during World War I by Turkish Muslims against Armenian Christians. At the same time, he pointedly ducked a meeting with non-clerical members of his own illusory abuse commission seeking to curtail sexual violence by priests against hundreds of thousands of defenseless children worldwide.
Two abuse survivors, Marie Collins and Peter Saunders, along with London-based psychiatrist Baroness, Sheila Hollins, and French child/adolescent psychiatrist, Dr. Catherine Bonnet, traveled to Francis’ residence, but he did not meet with them. For their widely publicized and considerable efforts, the commission members got a mere promise from Cardinal Sean O”Malley to tell Francis they are concerned, as indicated reportedly in the members’ statement released by the commission’s top staffer, Fr. Robert Oliver, formerly disgraced Cardinal Bernard Law’s canon lawyer. These developments were widely reported to Latino Catholics by CNN in Spanish, including with an interview with Juan Carlos Cruz, a top Philadelphia USA communications executive and a key abuse survivor in the current Chile crisis, see here,
[CNN]
Moreover, Francis has also avoided condemning adequately the Vatican’s role during his own lifetime in Mussolini’s facilitation of Hitler’s genocide of Jews, while Catholic clerics in Italy and Germany remained silent or worse, as amply documented in the recent and well regarded book, “The Pope and Mussolini”.
As to the Holocaust genocide itself, Gerald Posner has fairly and recently complained that Pope Francis’ Vatican archivists recently denied Posner access to Nazi era files that pertained to assets that may have been confiscated from Holocaust victims. And after Francis, who knows who will be calling the financial shots in Rome and granting access, if any? This is a real concern expressed by the perceptive Jesuit educated former Wall Street lawyer, Posner, the author of the troubling and comprehensive book, “God’s Bankers: A History of Money and Power at the Vatican” .
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