UNITED STATES
Al Jazeera
When Pope Francis makes his first visit to the U.S. this month, he will find that wounds from the U.S. Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal have not yet healed.
Those tensions are being played out in courtrooms and state legislatures, where the Church is using its legal and political clout to oppose bills that would extend the statute of limitations for victims of child sex abuse.
A statute of limitations forbids prosecutors or plaintiffs from taking legal action after a certain number of years.
The pontiff has vowed to root out “the scourge” of sex abuse from the Roman Catholic Church, and this year created a Vatican tribunal to judge clergy accused of such crimes.
But U.S. victims’ advocates contend the biggest obstacle they face in giving victims more time to report abuse remains the Church itself, and want the pope to change that stance.
The U.S. church has already been dealt a heavy financial blow by settlement payments and other costs totaling around $3 billion, which has forced it to sell off assets and cut costs.
“It is the bishops who have blocked any kind of meaningful reform,” said Marci Hamilton, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who studies statutes of limitations.
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