VATICAN CITY
The Atlantic
May 21, 2019
EMMA GREEN
The Vatican is working through an extraordinary series of events related to child sex abuse. Last month, Pope Francis apologized for “grave errors” in the way the Catholic Church handled sex-abuse cases in Chile, where a bishop, Juan Barros Madrid, was accused of covering up the crimes of another priest, Fernando Karadima. On Friday, following an emergency meeting in Rome with the pope, all 34 Chilean bishops offered their resignation over their handling of the allegations, an apparently unprecedented move.
Then, on Monday, the Spanish newspaper El Paīs reported that Juan Carlos Cruz, a Chilean sex-abuse survivor, had spoken with Pope Francis about his gay identity during a long meeting. “It doesn’t matter that you’re gay. God made you that way and that is the way he wants you to be, and I don’t mind,” Francis said, according to Cruz. “The pope wants you this way, too, and you have to be happy with who you are.”
The quickly unfolding events suggest an aggressive redirection for Pope Francis, who elevated the Chilean scandal into a full-on crisis in January, when he vigorously defended Barros during a papal visit to Chile and Peru. As the Church continues to wrestle with the aftershocks caused by clergy sex abuse around the world, its efforts to make amends in Chile may be a sign of a new approach ahead—or the extreme difficulty of recovering from years of misconduct and mishandled allegations.
The Chilean Church has been publicly grappling with its sex-abuse scandal for more than a half decade. In 2011, the Vatican announced that it had found Karadima guilty of sexually abusing minors. Subsequent developments suggested that Chilean bishops tried to keep the voices of abuse victims from being heard. Leaked emails showed that two cardinals sought to block Cruz, the Chilean abuse survivor, from serving on Pope Francis’s commission for the protection of minors. Victims accused Barros, who spent more than 30 years working with Karadima, of witnessing and covering up the abuse. Yet in 2015, Francis appointed him bishop of a diocese in southern Chile. When protesters objected to the move, the pope called them “dumb,” saying they had no proof against Barros.
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