UNITED STATES
Vox
Updated by Dylan Matthews on September 23, 2015
For the most part, Pope Francis’s first visit to North America is being met with giddy anticipation from the media and public figures. But one group is not so enthusiastic: survivors of clerical abuse.
Francis gets credit for doing much more than his predecessors to address the crisis. But the bar is low. For example, Pope John Paul II did shockingly little. His defenders asserted that he was unaware of the facts, but he was receiving reports detailing just how grave the situation was as early as 1985. “Other than making nine recorded public statements, all of which were sufficiently nuanced to be innocuous, and calling a meeting of the U.S. cardinals to tell them what everyone already knew, he did nothing positive,” victims’ advocate and priest Rev. Thomas Doyle writes. Pope Benedict XVI did more, but still left bishops like Kansas City’s Robert Finn, who were known to have covered up abuse, in power.
By contrast, some observers argue that Francis has taken meaningfully positive measures.”Pope Francis’s willingness to act on the issue of holding bishops accountable has been a great source of hope for Catholics who’ve wondered when this great unfinished business of the abuse scandal was going to get handled,” Grant Gallicho, an associate editor at Commonweal, contends.
But survivors of clerical sex abuse still aren’t celebrating the pope’s visit. Activists at Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) argue that Francis has offered more happy talk and conciliatory language than actual changes that would crack down on abusive clergy. They point to the breathtaking extent of the abuse: A 2004 paper by investigators at John Jay College found that between 1950 and 2002, 4,392 out of 109,794 total priests faced “not implausible” sexual assault accusations — 4 percent. As of 2014, the total was up to 6,427 priests credibly accused, with 17,259 alleged victims.
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