UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By Editorial Board
March 12
WHEN POPE Francis established a commission in 2014 to address sexual abuse by clergy members, he picked two survivors, victims themselves, to serve on the 17-member panel. Now, three years later, both are gone, having denounced foot-dragging and official intransigence inside the Vatican.
The fact that no survivors now serve as active members of Francis’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors is a measure of the Holy See’s resistance to change, and of its apparent inability to come to terms with the moral challenge posed by pedophile priests and bishops who enabled them. Sadly, the resignation this month from the commission of one survivor, which followed the forced ouster a year earlier of another, is only one among the more recent indications that the pope’s public pledges of zero tolerance for abuse and expressions of sympathy for victims are unmatched by institutional transformation.
In 2015, it was the pontifical commission that recommended establishing a tribunal to hold accountable bishops who turned a blind eye to abuse within their dioceses by shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish. Francis adopted the recommendation, then dropped it a year later in the face of bureaucratic impediments. He said bishops would be dealt with under existing Vatican rules, but none have been explicitly disciplined for negligence involving sexual abuse.
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