DENVER (CO)
Crux
August 17, 2019
By Inés San Martín
San Francisco, Argentina – Although by now Catholics in some parts of the world have lived with the ferment caused by revelations of clerical sexual abuse for decades, a bishop who heads a commission for preventing abuse in Argentina says that in Pope Francis’s native country, the crisis is “just beginning.”
“It’s not that the abuses are beginning, but society’s awareness, with cases becoming public,” said Bishop Sergio Buenanueva, of San Francisco, in the region of Cordoba. “The cases that expose this problem to the public produce a domino effect which, I believe, is positive.”
Buenanueva also told Crux that while he believes Pope Francis is having a deep impact on the local church, no pope, even history’s first from Argentina, has the capacity to reverse a centuries-long trend of secularization.
On the abuse crisis, the bishop insisted that transparency is healthy.
“In the first place, it’s positive for the victims, who’re now being heard by the Catholic Church and society at large,” he said. “The media has been part of this, and the justice system is doing its job too, with priests being condemned with adequately harsh punishments.”
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