Local Victims’ Advocates Voice Their ?concerns

By O’Ryan Johnson
Boston Herald
March 14, 2013

http://bostonherald.com/news_opinion/local_coverage/2013/03/local_victims_advocates_voice_their_concerns

Pope Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, hails from a region that has yet to be embroiled in the child sex abuse crisis that struck the church in America and Europe, leaving victims’ advocates here wary of his ascendency to St. Peter’s Chair.

Boston lawyer Mitchell Garabedian, who led legal actions over abuse against the church in Boston, said he believes the cardinals’ elections of an Argentinian was based solely on protecting its base in Latin America from other Christian denominations, not on addressing the lingering issues of pedophile priests.

“The church has made a political decision in voting for Pope Francis. The church is losing many, many parishioners to the evangelical church,” Garabedian said. “The church has made a decision to not lose parishioners in Central America and South America. It was a political decision by a trillion-dollar corporation.”

Phil Saviano, a board member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said he was at least relieved the new Holy Father was not among the so-called “Dirty Dozen” cardinals who SNAP identified as being complicit in either the abuse or cover-up of child sex crimes, though he is not convinced Latin America parishioners haven’t suffered abuse.

“There have only been isolated cases in Latin America,” Saviano said. “People there tend to be more deferential to the church. I go to Mexico a lot and I often wonder how many victims there are. The concept of speaking out and saying something against a priest is unheard of in those cultures. Now that all this attention is being directed toward Latin America, probably we will start hearing if there are cases there.”

But Saviano added that the new pope has a long list of problems to address, and he fears rocking the boat over sex abuse will not be among them.

“I think he’s going to get chewed up,” Saviano said. “He really is an outsider ... There are financial problems, there are supposedly sex scandals within the Vatican. Here in the U.S. and much of Europe, attendance is dropping off dramatically.”