|
Bishop Accountability Releases Important New Document Studying Pope Francis's Record on Abuse Cases in Argentina: News Is Not Promising
By William D. Lindsey
Today, the group Bishop
Accountability has just uploaded to its website an important
new document examining Pope Francis's record on abuse cases
in Argentina, when he was (as Cardinal Bergoglio) archbishop of
Buenos Aires. The news this document summarizes is not promising
for those hoping that Francis will proactively address the abuse
crisis in the Catholic church now that he is pope.
As an emailed press
release about the new document sent out by Anne Barrett Doyle of
Bishop Accountability today states,
The new analysis raises sobering questions about the pope's forthrightness and commitment to child protection. It reveals that then-Cardinal Bergoglio, Argentina's most powerful Catholic leader, chose not to meet with victims, sided with a convicted child molester, and released no information about sex abuse cases in the Buenos Aires archdiocese. He even said that he had never dealt with an abusive priest. This new addition to the
Bishop Accountability site also includes the first public
database of accused Argentine clerics, with exhaustively
documented summaries of cases against 42 priests and brothers--a
"fraction of the actual number of accused Argentine
clerics," according to researchers cited by Bishop
Accountability, which notes that Argentina has the tenth largest
Catholic population in the world, but appears to have fewer than
half the accused priests of the diocese of Manchester, New
Hampshire, and a twentieth of the number of accused clerics in
the much smaller nation of the Netherlands, the bishops'
conference has enumerated some 800 accused clerics.
The
analysis of Bishop Accountability highlights five cases in
Argentina in which there are serious questions about Cardinal
Bergoglio's transparency and compassion for victims. As the
Bishop Accountability media release states,
Buenos Aires archbishop from 1998 to 2013 and president of the Argentine Episcopal Conference from 2005 to 2011, years when bishops in Europe and North America were issuing apologies, meeting with victims, and disclosing numbers and names of abusive clergy, Cardinal Bergoglio appears to have expressed no public support for victims and, according to his spokesperson at the time, did not meet with them. Yet this was the period when Pope John Paul II ordered all bishops, including Cardinal Bergoglio, to send all abuse cases to the Vatican, and when Pope Benedict met with many victims, beginning with his visit to the U.S. in 2008. The press release also
notes that Argentine bishops have continued Cardinal
Bergoglio's strategy of minimization right to the present,
and are among the least transparent bishops in the worldwide
church. As it states,
They have released no documents, no names of accused priests, not even tallies of accused. As of March 11, 2014, the Argentine bishops' conference still had not published the abuse-response policy that it was supposed to finalize and submit to the Vatican by May 2012. Such policies have been posted by bishops' conferences in Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, as well as those in the US, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe. As many folks have been
saying, the proof of the pudding of this papacy, with its plans
for institutional reform, will lie in what Francis chooses to do
about the abuse crisis. Up to now, he has done . . . nothing.
Nothing at all.
Bishop
Accountability's document may explain why that's the
case.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.