VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Los Ángeles Press [Ciudad de México, Mexico]
November 4, 2024
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
As a tempest in a teapot, Tutela Minorum, the entity dealing with clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church published its first report.
The Roman Catholic Church global report fails to provide any hope of a much-needed measure of justice for the clergy sexual abuse victims.
Only one fifth of the bishops of Mexico answered an information request from Rome and, despite the claims in the report, there is no evidence that the 98 Roman Catholic dioceses in Mexico have a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez
On Tuesday October 29th, at Rome, Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, the emeritus bishop of Boston, and other members of Tutela Minorum, the entity tasked with preventing clergy sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church presented their first annual report on the subject.
There was the general secretary of that entity, the auxiliary bishop of Bogotá, Colombia, Luis Manuel Alí Herrera; Maud de Boer-Buquicchio a Dutch and Italian lawyer with a long career in human rights promotion and defense at different civil institutions in the European Union.
Also, Juan Carlos Cruz Chellew, a clergy sexual abuse survivor who, besides his involvement with Tutela Minorum promotes other projects to address or prevent sexual abuse in his native Chile and other countries.
In attendance there was the adjunct secretary of Tutela Teresa Morris Kettelkamp, who is a retired state police colonel in Illinois, and the former safeguarding executive director of the United States Bishops Conference.
Also, in attendance but with no actual participation during the conference there was social worker and religious sister Mary Niluka Perera, a Sri Lankan national, member of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd since 1996, she holds a master’s degree in social work from the University of Mumbai-India, and she leads Catholic Care for Children International, a global NGO funded by female religious advocating for the rights and care of minors, and she is either consultant or member of other entities at the Holy See.
De Boer-Buquicchio, Morris Kettelkamp, and Niluka Perera are three of the seven female members of Tutela Minorum, the so-called Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, whose full roster of members is available in English here.
The report does not go into the issue of abuse as such. It deals with the policies to prevent clergy sexual abuse. So, from the scope is rather limited, and even on the subject of prevention it says little or nothing about specific, measurable goals. In that regard, even the idea of “access to information” (p. 4 of the full report in English) seems to be remote, because there are no specific measures to bring that idea of “access to information” to reality. It is a good wish, nothing else.
Cardinal O’Malley did his best to portray the report as some sort of improvement. He is a veteran of the issue. Even before taking over the archdiocese of Boston, where he replaced cover up “artist” Cardinal Bernard Law, he was already aware of the extent of the sexual abuse crisis in Boston, the United States, and elsewhere.
Before taking over Boston, the stage where the drama depicted in the movie Spotlight unfolds, he spent ten years as bishop of Fall River, Massachusetts, a suffragan diocese of Boston, so it is possible to assume that he knew what was happening at the archdiocese.
When Bernard Law went to hide in Rome, John Paul II appointed O’Malley to pick up the mess at Boston. And he did. He had to sell Real Estate and other properties to settle the many criminal acts that his predecessors were more than willing to cover up in Boston, so it is clear that when he talks about lessons learned, he is not paying lip service.
He knows the kind of damage clergy sexual abuse brings upon the institution because he has been a first-hand witness to the merging and closing of parishes in the Boston metropolitan area.
Back in 2018, Boston Magazine summarized the then current situation there as follows:
«Almost 17 years ago, the sex-abuse scandal shattered the Catholic Church’s dominance of Boston’s culture. The city of 2001, depicted in the movie Spotlight, seems alien, a relic of another century, with its deference to priestly authority, its fear of challenging the church, and the omnipresence of bishops’ political influence. For generations, Boston was a Catholic town—in fact, some considered it the most prominent Roman Catholic city in America. Now, the church is declining in its influence, its esteem, its hold on people. »
Stark outlook
The effects are hard to dismiss. This summary from different sources on religious practice in Massachusetts from April 2024, offers a stark outlook on the situation there, with 57 percent of adults in the Boston metro area never or rarely attending any religious service.
That 57 percent figure is already worse than the reported 43 percent share of a similar survey from 2014, so O’Malley knows that there is a pervasive effect blasting even his personal efforts to address the issue at Boston and elsewhere in the United States.
When hearing O’Malley at Rome it is possible to believe him, because for the last 20 years or so, he has been dealing with lawsuits, while going over the figures of his archdiocese’s bank statements, and the results of the many studies about the effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in his archdiocese.
Perhaps that is why O’Malley is credited with playing some role in changing Pope Francis’s attitudes towards the issue at a global scale.
Up until 2018, when the Pontiff had his disastrous trip to Chile and Peru, his attitude was to exert the full powers of the Papacy with little or no regard for the opinions of the people affected by his decisions.
Back in 2015, he had appointed one of the so-called Karadima’s bishops as head of the diocese of Osorno, a small, coastal town in Southern Chile, almost 500 miles or 800 kilometers South of Santiago.
The appointment went almost immediately sour, prompting never seen protests because of Juan Barros Madrid’s role as one of Fernando Karadima’s protégés and partners in crime as leaders of the so-called Pious Priestly Union, a now suppressed group of priests in Santiago linked to Karadima and his sexual abuse practices in the Chilean capital.
Jorge Mario Bergoglio dismissed all accusations raised against Barros Madrid, even if by 2017 there was no way to downplay Karadima’s crimes given the fact that Benedict XVI had already accepted some kind of guilt back in 2011.
The acknowledgment was, as in other cases during Ratzinger’s time as Pope full of grandiose statements, but with little or no substance, since Karadima was allowed to remain a priest, sheepherding the Chilean rich and famous after.
Blame the lefties
Up until the last mass presided by Francis in Chile, the Argentine Pontiff stuck to the “blame-the-lefties” template, so common in the Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic world.
The narrative pushed by the Holy See of Francis’s trip to Chile and Peru, has Cardinal O’Malley as playing a key role in changing the Pontiff’s understanding of the extent of the crisis and how damaging was for the Church.
O’Malley went, out of agenda, from Boston to Lima to talk with the Pope. Back in Rome, Francis summoned all the Chilean bishops to ask their resignations. Pope Francis kept some of the Chilean bishops in their position.
Oddly enough, despite their own inaction, the Chilean bishops find time and energy to demand action from the Chilean government on other cases of sexual abuse, creating an unbearable paradox as the message posted in social media by the Chilean network of survivors exemplifies.
[SCREENSHOT: Juan Carlos Cruz Chellew during the press conference.]
The same network, by the way issued a stark criticism of Juan Carlos Cruz Chellew, who, as the video before this paragraph proves, saluted the report enthusiastically, to his fellow Chilean survivors’ dismay.
In any case, Cardinal O’Malley is already 80 years old. Five years ago, he resigned his position as archbishop of Boston. The Argentine Pope accepted it back in August. It is unclear how many months or years O’Malley will remain as head of Tutela; it is already an anomaly to have him there, especially after Francis’s more recent round of reforms at the Curia, stressing the need to observe the rules regarding the age-limits for bishops (75 years) and Cardinals in the Roman curia (80 years).
The latitude in this case, unlike other positions at the Roman Curia, where clerics from all over the world are more than willing to accept a promotion to Rome, comes from the fact that it is not easy to find who wants to become the face of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church.
One only needs to see at what happened to father Andrew Small, Tutela’s now emeritus secretary, who despite his best efforts to fund the commission, faces up until now severe criticism, “friendly fire” some people call it, for how he procured the monies.
Main problem is that even if his successor in Tutela, Colombian bishop Alí Herrera, seems to know his script by heart, making the kind of grandiose bombastic statements about the issue so common in Spanish-speaking Roman Catholic circles, there is little or no indication about him having the kind of awareness one finds in O’Malley’s words and deeds.
Back in March, when Pope Francis appointed Alí Herrera to his current charge I saw little or no reason to be enthusiastic about that, as the story linked above tells. Mostly, because the Roman Catholic Church in Colombia still has ways to isolate itself from the kind of consequences of clergy sexual abuse informing Cardinal O’Malley’s take on the crisis.
One only needs to pay attention to O’Malley’s English-speaking statement about the need to go deeper and actually addressing the crisis.
[SCREENSHOT: Cardinal O’Malley addresses the press conference in English.]
Language games
Unlike his opening statement in English, available before this paragraph, O’Malley’s chose to answer in Spanish a question issued in Italian. The reporter was asking about the possibility of creating a church ombudsperson to deal with clergy sexual abuse and the difficulties the victims face to even access basic information about their cases.
It is hard to know if O’Malley’s decision to use Spanish is an implicit way to point out at something, but there was no actual need for him to do it, when he was talking originally in English, and the journalist asked his question in Italian
[SCREENSHOT: Cardinal O’Malley addresses the press conference in Spanish.]
O’Malley’s response in Spanish stresses the contradictory nature of the existing rules (0:23) requiring victims to go to their diocese but (0:35) he acknowledges said approach “is not working” (no está funcionando).
He talks about the beginning of a conversation on the issue, and then he lets his second in command at Tutela, Colombian bishop Alí Herrera, insist on the same idea, with little or no indication of whether there is going to be any change soon as to allow for the emergence of the ombudsperson figure in the Church
[SCREENSHOT: Bishop Alí Herrera and the question of a Church Ombudsperson.]
Something similar happens with Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the Dutch and Italian lawyer with a storied career promoting better practices when dealing with human rights at the European institutions over the last 40 years or so
[SCREENSHOT: Maud de Boer-Buquichio at the press conference.]
Her approach to the issue is respectful of the institution she is serving now, and lends some credibility to the Church’s efforts, but as Francis’s most recent pastoral trip to Belgium proves, the issue of the unwillingness of the Church to address the root causes of the crisis remains the source of trouble in Europe too.
Risky bets
Sadly, for many Cardinals and bishops, the answer to that reality is not to address the root causes of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, but to wage their social and political capital in supporting the most radical brands of national populism in European politics, as bishops in the United States have been doing for the last ten years or so with Donald Trump.
In that regard, even if bishop Alí Herrera first statement in Spanish seems to be aware of the situation, it is hard to believe because there is evidence of how the conference of Roman Catholic bishops of Colombia deals with issues, barricading itself under the complexities of its status as semi-established Church there, while also enjoying the limitations of civil and penal law that prevent sweeping action on this issue in Latin America.
As far as Latin America is concerned this first “pilot” report only includes Mexico as a country from this region. The report is available in full only in English and Italian with executive summaries in other languages. The full set of versions of the report are available here.
In that regard, despite Alí Herrera’s grandiose speech about his commitment to make the world aware of the relevance of the issue in the Spanish-speaking world, available after his paragraph, it seems to be one more rendition of the “much ado about nothing” idea, so painfully common in Latin American Roman Catholicism
[SCREENSHOT: Bishop Alí Herrera talks about why he speaks in Spanish at the conference.]
What prevented him or his team from publishing a full and official translation of the document? Only bishop Alí Herrera knows the true answer to that question.
What the report portrays in that respect is how the Mexican bishops would rather blame other failing institutions in Mexico rather than accepting that the majority of the dioceses there have been unwilling to comply with Pope Francis’s mandate to set at least diocesan commissions to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
Earlier this year, Los Ángeles Press went deep into the Mexican case in the story linked above of how the Mexican dioceses are complying or not with Pope Francis’s goals set back in 2019 to at least set up a commission to prevent, not even to address, only to prevent clergy sexual abuse.
And yes, there are issues in Mexico with how the judiciary is in the middle of a crisis, not to mention the inability of the states’ and nation’s attorneys offices to deal with sexual abuse at large and clergy sexual abuse more specifically, but none of that is relevant when dealing with the issue of why the Mexican (and Latin American) bishops are unwilling to set up even the diocesan commissions to prevent abuse.
Even the rate of response from the Mexican bishops is dismal. The report states (p. 29) a 20 percent response rate. With the 98 dioceses in Mexico we are talking about 18 or 20 dioceses. If that is the response to a request issued by a Cardinal with the alleged full support of the Pope, that gives an idea of how relevant is the issue of clergy sexual abuse for the Mexican Roman Catholic bishops.
On the same page 29, the report claims that all the Mexican dioceses have a commission to prevent clergy sexual abuse. There is no evidence of that, as can be seen here, at the conference’s webpage and at the story linked before the table above.
For the rest of Latin America, Los Ángeles Press offered a preliminary report on how the national conferences of bishops in Latin America are complying with the 2019 request. As the story linked after this paragraph, compliance with the Pontiff’s request is not the norm in the Roman Catholic Church in Latin America.
And compliance is an issue, because as the 2019 reform proves, Popes, Francis included used to be able to express wishes that their underlings will be willing to fulfill. That is not the case anymore, much less when there are no actual potential consequences for non-compliance with the rules set forth by the Pontiff on this or any other issue.
Clergy sexual abuse as toy
What is worse. Clergy sexual abuse becomes the proxy, a toy of sorts, for the intestine wars confronting the more conservative wing of the Latin American Catholic episcopate, fully aligned with bishops like Raymond Burke, Charles Chaput, or Robert Barron in the United States, and the wing that at least in appearance seems to be in communion with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as the story from Peru linked below tells.
In this respect, the pilot report, although useful for those of us already engaged in a systematic follow-up of the clergy sexual abuse crisis, offers little or no hope for the many victims of this phenomenon, especially those in countries with weak judiciaries and nations’ attorneys as it is the case of Latin America.
If anything, the report confirms the difficulties bishops from Latin America have to understand the reach and potential effects of the crisis, something that bishops like Cardinal O’Malley have learnt the hard way, having to deal with a barrage of lawsuits.
In any case, it is key to keep in mind that Cardinal O’Malley is already 80 years old. Given his age and perceived proximity to Francis, will find increasingly hard to be heard by other bishops in his home country who are in some sort of silent schism, some of them betting big on Donald Trump being elected tomorrow as President and angry over Francis’s decision to dismiss Joseph Strickland as bishop of Tyler, Texas, and more than willing to go back to an era of denial as the “solution” to this kind of issue.
Alí Herrera said some of the right things, the kind of things that one expects from a Latin American bishop, but the actual chances of him doing something to force down the national conferences of bishops in Latin America and elsewhere seem weak to say the least.
His message in Rome, by the way, was very similar to a message he recorded for the Latin American bishops, in Spanish, with English subtitles, available after this paragraph
[SCREENSHOT: Bishop Alí Herrera addresses other bishops of Latin America.]
As a previous piece in this series stated, when commenting on his original appointment back in March, it seems hard to believe that some of the archbishops in Latin America, will be willing to pay attention to Alí Herrera, even if he was actually the advocate for change that he seemed so desperate to be on Tuesday October, 29th.
His performance as far as the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Colombia, his home country, where the Church retains some of its power and protection from the authorities, makes him an improbable choice for a true change of heart from the Latin American bishops.
Distrust is real, and despite Alí Herrera’s performance Rome appears to be unwilling to acknowledge how deep it goes. One of many examples comes from the survivors of clergy sexual abuse in Pope Francis’s Argentina.
After Tutela published the report, the account of the Argentine survivors network at what used to be Twitter published a thread providing a painful reminder of the extent of the damage there.
Alí Herrera’s position and role is relevant because given Cardinal O’Malley’s age, there is a chance the Colombian bishops could become at some point the head of the commission, unless—of course—Pope Francis decides to replace O’Malley with some other archbishop or Cardinal with a true record of dealing with the effects of the clergy sexual abuse crisis in an institutional context as that of the United States where there have been actual consequences for the Church for its mishandling of cases.
Main problem, however, is that putting aside Cardinal Joseph William Tobin, the archbishop of Newark, New Jersey, it is hard to think of anybody with a similar profile. As O’Malley had to do with Bernard Law’s mess in Boston, Tobin has had to deal with other clerics’ mess in Newark.
As good as the idea of publishing a report is, there needs to be some care as to what the report will be about. If, as it happened with the Mexican conference of Roman Catholic bishops it will be about the excuses to not comply even with the Church’s own internal rules and regulations, makes little or no sense to talk about a report as such.