ROME (ITALY)
Washington Post
February 24, 2019
By Chico Harlan
At a Mass marking the end of an unprecedented Vatican summit, Pope Francis on Sunday called for an “all-out battle” against clerical sexual abuse, saying the church needed to take “every necessary measure” to end the scourge.
But his remarks were short on specifics and roundly criticized by victims of abuse, who said the four-day summit amounted to a training seminar that concluded with no concrete steps and advocated for behavioral changes that should have been obvious years ago.
Speaking at a gilded and frescoed hall at the Vatican, Francis said that abuse should never be “covered up” or tolerated. But the pontiff’s words, which included general calls for improved national-level guidelines, underscored the looming challenges for an institution that has long acknowledged the seriousness of clerical abuse but nonetheless struggled to curtail it.
Francis mentioned unspecified “legislation” that the Catholic Church will draw up, and said it will “spare no effort to do all that is necessary to bring to justice” anyone who has committed the “crimes” of abuse. He did not mention a zero-tolerance policy — a step that advocates have long called for to codify the idea that clerics found guilty of abuse be removed permanently from the priesthood.
The pope had called for the abuse summit while facing abuse-related scandals on multiple continents — stemming from cases that sometimes showed the complicity of church higher-ups in protecting abusers. At the start of the summit Thursday, Francis had called for “concrete and effective measures” to contend with the problem. And though some of the Vatican’s handpicked speakers described their ideas for such measures, it is clear that any follow-through will have to come in the months and years ahead — if at all.
The event organizers have said they will remain in Rome in the coming days to discuss some of the ideas aired at the summit.
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