ROME
Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests
Posted by Barbara Blaine on April 08, 2013
For the third time in less than a month, a disturbing revelation has surfaced about Pope Francis’ handling of clergy sex crimes and cover ups.
The Wall Street Journal reports that while he was Argentina’s most powerful prelate, the pope did not meet a Vatican deadline for writing an abuse policy.
This disclosure follows two other recent troubling ones: Pope Francis’ meeting with Cardinal Bernard Law hours after his election and Francis’ intervention to help free a convicted Argentinian priest.
Catholic officials have been dealing with – and ignoring, hiding and enabling – child sex crimes for decades if not centuries. So writing an abuse policy is an extraordinarily minimal move. This is the most simple, cheap and ineffective step prelates can take, in response to this horror: simply writing an abuse policy.
(In our experience, these policies are largely meaningless. Bishops continue, no matter what written policies say, to handle abuse cases however they like. But an abuse policy, even if consistently violated, is better than no policy at all. And when the Vatican orders that such polices be adopted, the least prelates can do is to adopt them.)
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.