UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on February 18, 2016 by Betty Clermont
In the last two weeks, global events show that Pope Francis is enabling the clerical sex abuse of children by appointing, promoting and refusing to remove bishops with terrible histories of aiding and abetting abuse and by refusing to make meaningful change.
On Feb. 4, clerical sex abuse survivor and member of the pope’s commission on sex abuse, Peter Saunders, arranged for the movie, Spotlight, to be screened for members of the commission. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, the movie is about the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations into the cover up by Catholic officials of serial pedophile priests.
Two days later, Saunders was booted off the commission. Saunders had been an outspoken critic of Pope Francis’ appointment of a Chilean bishop accused not only of covering up for the most notorious pedophile priest in that country, but also of witnessing the sex abuse. Additionally, Saunders had called the pope’s financial tsar, Cardinal George Pell, “almost sociopathic” for his brutal treatment of victims in Australia.
“On child abuse, I now fear, there is little or no sincerity on his (Francis’) part to effectively make change,” said Saunders, who was abused by two priests as a child. “There needs to be a turning out of all these people who have got very, very grim records – either they are abusers or they are known to have protected abusers or have enabled an abuser or made excuses for abusers.”
Saunders says a call he made for more openness and transparency at a meeting last week was rejected.
“I was shot down in flames,” he said, “The commission said that they need to remain secret and it was surprising how many times that word was used – not ‘confidential’ but ‘secret’ – the word has connotations with abuse because the whole nasty, vile world of the rape and sexual abuse of children exists because it is secret; it happens behind closed doors,” he said.
Eliminating secrecy is exactly what the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) has been calling on the Church to do for decades. This is what the pope and his men have refused to do. Catholic officials must open their secret files and make all the hidden documents public. The names of all Church employees with credible accusations of child sex abuse made public. There are still sexual predators assaulting children under the protection of the Church.
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