VATICAN CITY
The New Yorker
BY JAMES CARROLL
DECEMBER 23, 2013
On most Wednesdays, the Pope gives a general audience, and this one was packed. It was a balmy October morning, and more than a hundred thousand pilgrims, tourists, and Romans had funnelled into St. Peter’s Square. It was the first of three large gatherings Pope Francis presided over that week for a celebration of the family during the Catholic Church’s “Year of Faith.”
Wooden railings imposed order in the square. I was about thirty yards from the Pope. In front of me were a pair of Vatican ushers in white tie and tails, several clergy, a short man in a yarmulke, and a handsome couple holding hands. Beyond them, Francis, seventy-six years old, in his stark-white cassock and skullcap, seemed energized by the festive crowd. A large man with a ready smile, he read from a brief text in Italian, but with fervor. “What kind of love do we bring to others? . . . Do we treat each other like brothers and sisters? Or do we judge one another?” The throng was silent, listening carefully. After Francis spoke, others summarized the remarks in various languages. Then a line of prelates approached his chair.
Now the prelates were gone, and Francis, with guards at a discreet distance, moved along the railing, greeting the people. The couple in the front row were in their thirties, tall, and dressed in dark clothing. Unlike others at the railing, who were waving and calling, “Papa Francesco! Papa Francesco!,” they held back. But when Francis turned to them the woman leaned forward with such gravity that the Pope took notice and stopped. Tears streaked her face. Francis reached for her hand, which she took as license to put her mouth by his ear. She whispered something. Francis looked startled, drew back a bit, then turned to her partner. The Pope embraced him, then drew the woman in. They stood like that for a while, the couple enveloped in the arms of the Bishop of Rome. Then Francis placed his hands on the man’s head. The man’s shoulders shook slightly. The Pope made a sign of the cross in the air above them and moved on. …
But, in all this anticipated progress, the Church’s sexual-abuse crisis still lingers. Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a comprehensive archive of the abuse crisis, pointed out to me that the Vatican questionnaire contains no questions about what the exploitation of children by priests has done to Catholic families. What of the broken trust? When will parents again resume the easy confidence in parish priests that was once a defining mark of Catholic life? And how will bishops resume their role as dependable shepherds?
Early this month, Francis met in Rome with bishops from the Netherlands. In 2011, an official Dutch commission concluded that Church officials had “failed to take adequate action” regarding the abuse of tens of thousands of children in Catholic institutions, going back to 1945. The Dutch Church, humiliated and penitent, was staggered. More victims surfaced. In prepared remarks, Francis was to have said to the bishops, “I wish to express my compassion and to insure my closeness in prayer to every victim of sexual abuse, and to their families. I ask you to continue to support them along the painful path of healing that they have undertaken with courage.” The text was handed to the bishops, but instead of actually speaking it Francis engaged the bishops informally, and the prepared expression of compassion, while released by the Vatican press office, was not delivered as written.
Since becoming Pope, Francis has hardly mentioned the abuse crisis. He has not met with victims, and, though continuing Benedict’s espoused “zero tolerance” of sexual abuse itself, he has yet to adjust Vatican policies governing the responsibilities of bishops. Two days after Francis’s meeting with Dutch bishops, the Vatican refused to provide the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child with records of its sexual-abuse investigations. A fierce critic of self-serving and entitled priests, Francis has yet to confront the way in which the inbred clerical culture itself provided the cover—and the license—both for abuse and for the denial and deflection with which bishops responded to it.
For Doyle and other critics, the failure starts with Bergoglio’s role in Argentina, a country where sexual abuse of children by priests remains a largely untold story. “The Pope should begin with his own record in Argentina,” Doyle said in a statement. “We urge him to release a complete list of all credibly accused clerics with whom he dealt. . . . He should then compel every bishop and religious superior worldwide to publish a similar list, as twenty-six U.S. bishops and religious superiors have done.”
Miriam Lewin is a prominent Argentine journalist whose investigations into priests’ abuse of children over a dozen years have helped push the scandal into the open in Buenos Aires. I asked her what she made of the Pope’s recent expression of compassion for victims. “Just words,” she said. “He should meet personally with victims. He should support civil justice against priests and send the pedophiles to jail. After that, his words will mean something.” When I asked her what she thought of Bergoglio, she answered that he has a different “kind of responsibility now.” She added, “Bergoglio is one thing. Francesco is another.”
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