SANTIAGO (CHILE)
Agence France-Presse
June 13, 2018
Maltese archbishop Charles Scicluna and fellow papal envoy Jordi Bertomeu will take witness statements from victims of sexual abuse within the Church
The Vatican’s top abuse investigator arrived in Chile on Tuesday, June 12, a day after Pope Francis accepted the resignation of 3 bishops from the scandal-wracked Chilean Church.
Maltese archbishop Charles Scicluna and fellow papal envoy Jordi Bertomeu will take witness statements from victims of sexual abuse within the Church and provide instruction to Chilean dioceses to respond adequately to any new complaints.
“We have come to ask forgiveness” from the victims on behalf of Pope Francis, said Bertomeu as they arrived in Santiago.
The two investigators will meet Wednesday, June 13, with Canon law experts from Chilean dioceses who will provide “technical and legal assistance” in order to “provide adequate responses to each case of child sexual abuse committed by clerics or religious,” Scicluna told reporters.
The two officials are due to travel to Osorno, the Catholic diocese led by Juan Barros, one of 3 bishops whose resignation Francis accepted following a child sex abuse scandal that has come to haunt his papacy.
Scicluna told reporters that the visit to Barros’s diocese of Osorno aimed to “express the particular closeness of the pope to the diocese of Osorno and his beloved people.”
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