Francis Isn't Asked about Abuse Because He Reminds US of Jesus

By David Quinn
Irish Independent
December 13, 2013

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/columnists/david-quinn/francis-isnt-asked-about-abuse-because-he-reminds-us-of-jesus-29834323.html

Pope Francis waves as he leaves after his weekly general audience in St. Peter's Square at the Vatican earlier this week

It is a remarkable thing that in the various interviews he has granted to date, Pope Francis hasn't been asked to reflect in any substantial way at all on the clerical child abuse scandals.

On his flight back from World Youth Day in Brazil a few months ago, he spent 80 minutes answering questions from journalists and the matter did not come up.

When he granted a lengthy and widely reported interview to various Jesuit publications more recently, again, he was not asked about it.

And when the atheist founder of one of Italy's leading newspapers, 'La Repubblica', interviewed him shortly after that, it did not occur to the interviewer to bring it up.

Here in Ireland, the Catholic Church's child protection office has published its latest audits of the child protection procedures of a selection of the country's dioceses and religious orders.

The usual pattern emerged. In the dioceses, the scandals were at their peak in the 1970s and 1980s. In the case of religious congregations such as the Christian Brothers, the scandals were at their peak when the industrial schools were still operating.

The audits found once again that up until around the mid-1990s, the church dealt with the scandals appallingly badly and since then there has been a dramatic and incremental improvement.

In fact, the church's child protection systems are now probably the best in the country. On a regular basis, we discover that the State has been failing to implement its own child protection systems properly with sometimes terrible consequences for children.

However, no one within the apparatus of the State ever seems to be held accountable for these failures and there is never any real public demand that someone be held accountable, unlike in Britain where senior social workers have sometimes had to resign over particularly bad child protection failures.

Returning to Pope Francis, given that the church in every part of the world has been hit by these scandals, the fact that he is not asked about child sexual abuse by journalists is, as I say, remarkable.

The contrast with the attitude of journalists towards his predecessor Pope Benedict could hardly be sharper. Benedict was indelibly associated in the minds of many people with the scandals.

There were two main reasons for this. The first is that he was a doctrinal conservative and the perception, quite incorrectly, is that conservative bishops were much more likely to cover up the scandals than their more liberal counterparts.