VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic Culture - Trinity Communications [San Diego CA]
November 20, 2024
By Phil Lawler
When I saw this lede on a Reuters news story this week, my sense of déjà vu was overwhelming:
A former top Vatican official who dealt with clergy sexual abuse issues joined victims on Monday in urging Pope Francis to enact a zero-tolerance law throughout the global Catholic church so any cleric found guilty of abuse would be removed from ministry.
Really?! Are we really still talking about “zero tolerance” for abuse at this late date? Maybe the Reuters report misrepresented the talk by Father Hans Zollner, who heads a program at the Gregorian University on curbing abuse. Maybe the term “zero tolerance” has simply become a shorthand expression, intended to cover all sorts of efforts to protect children.
”Zero tolerance” was the policy the US bishop endorsed during their Dallas meeting in 2002. “Zero tolerance” is the approach that Pope Francis demanded when speaking to reporters in 2014 and again in 2022 Portuguese television interview.
Why is it still newsworthy, then, when a prominent Catholic calls for “zero tolerance” today?
Answer: because for all the talk, for all the pledges, for all the touted policies and programs, the Vatican has not adopted a “zero tolerance” mentality regarding abuse.
Last week, when the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors held a conference on Safeguarding in the Catholic Church in Europe, Pope Francis send a strong message of support, citing the event as “a sign of the Church’s continuing efforts to protect the most vulnerable in our midst.” This week the papal X (Twitter) account sent sent more words of encouragement, this time for anti-abuse efforts in Italy: “Every abuse is a betrayal of trust, it is a betrayal of life!” For years now the Pope has been issuing strong statements on the urgent need to stamp about abuse; his rhetoric has been powerful. And yet…
During that conference last week, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the president of the papal abuse commission, renewed his call for “strong leadership in taking the necessary actions to, as best possible, prevent any occurrence of abuse in the future.” No reasonable person could object to the cardinal’s rallying cry. But didn’t we hear that same rallying cry in Dallas in 2002—and countless times thereafter? Where is the “strong leadership” that Cardinal O’Malley envisions; why hasn’t it emerged?
At that same conference Bishop Luis Manuel Ali Herrera, the Colombian secretary of the papal commission, said (according to a CNS report) “that for abuse to thrive, a network had to be built that allowed that crime to continue.”
Yes, we know. When the scandal erupted in Boston in 2000, we learned, to our sorrow, about the clerical network that protected abusive priests. In 2018 the secondary explosion of the McCarrick scandal taught us that the network reached up to the top tiers of Vatican leadership, and protected abusive prelates, too. In the intervening years, revelations from one country after another exposed the same ugly pattern. The networks were—and perhaps still are—powerful and pervasive. It follows, then, that to eliminate abuse we must root out those networks. “Zero tolerance” for abuse implies zero tolerance for the old-boy networks.
Yet those networks remain in place. The system that protected McCarrick and Barros and Zanchetta now protects Rupnik. In every one of those cases Pope Francis had an opportunity to break through the phalanx of clerical protection. Again and again he has chosen not to do so, “zero tolerance” to the contrary notwithstanding.
More than a month ago I wrote about a stunning new Vatican scandal, in which the Pope’s chief of staff overturned a disciplinary sentence imposed on a priest by an ecclesiastical tribunal—and then was himself overruled by the top official of the Vatican office charged with the disciplinary treatment of abuse cases. After analyzing this astonishing double-reverse, I concluded:
So two influential Vatican officials have issued statements that contradict each other, and it seems reasonable to think that each one consulted with Pope Francis. If they did both talk with the Pope, it seems he pointed them in opposite directions—or else at least one of the prelates has gone rogue. If the Pope was not involved in this case—the latest Vatican mishandling of the most damaging scandal in recent Church history—that too is part of this curious story.
Anyone who honestly seeks a “zero tolerance” policy regarding abuse must confront the implications of this latest scandal. Yet the Vatican—and the world’s Catholic hierarchy, and even the world’s media—has shown no interest. Ed Condon of The Pillar (the only other outlet that has taken the story seriously), today vented his frustration about “the deafening silence surrounding the Principi affair.”
If at this late date Pope Francis was ready to approve the negotiated reduction of an ecclesiastical penalty for abuse—or to tolerate the interference of a subordinate who made the deal without his approval—and if the Catholic world does not react with astonishment and outrage—then all the talk about “zero tolerance” is pointless.
Phil Lawler has been a Catholic journalist for more than 30 years. He has edited several Catholic magazines and written eight books. Founder of Catholic World News, he is the news director and lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.