Child sex abuse akin to ‘human sacrifice’: Pope

The Catholic Church will stop covering up the crimes of paedophile priests “as was usual in the past”, Pope Francis said yesterday at the end of the Vatican’s anti-child abuse summit, but his much-anticipated speech was short on concrete measures.
The unprecedented summit was called in response to a new spate of clergy sex abuse and cover-up allegations, including in the US, Chile, Germany and Australia, which exacerbated the Catholic Church’s decades-old sex abuse crisis.
“No abuse must ever be covered up, as was usual in the past, or overlooked, as covering up abuses favours the spread of evil and adds a further layer of scandal,” the Pope said in a closing speech to the four-day conference.
Addressing an audience of nearly 200, including 114 bishops from around the world and a handful of nuns, he reaffirmed that “even a single case of abuse – which already in itself represents an atrocity – [...] will be tackled with the utmost seriousness.”
“We have heard these commitments to ‘confront abuse’ many times before. When and how is what we need to hear – in detail,” Marie Collins, an abuse survivor who resigned from a Vatican anti-sex abuse panel in 2017, commented on Twitter.
The Vatican announced “concrete initiatives” in a separate statement.
These include new child protection rules for the Vatican City State and the Roman Curia, the Vatican’s central administration, to soon be published by the Pope, Father Federico Lombardi, a summit organiser, told reporters.
The Pope will issue “a new Motu Proprio” on the “protection of minors and vulnerable persons”, he said after the Pope’s speech.
Motu Proprios are legal documents issued under the Pope’s personal authority, and this one will “strengthen prevention and the fight against abuse on the part of the Roman Curia and Vatican City State”, Lombardi said.
Francis also wants to create “task forces” to help local parishes fight clerical paedophilia and the Vatican will draw up guidelines for bishops on dealing with abuse cases, he added.
There will also be a new Vatican-issued code of conduct for bishops handling abuse cases, and “task forces” deployed to national Catholic Church organisations that are further behind on anti-abuse measures, Lombardi said.
Opening the summit on Thursday, Francis presented a 21-point reform road map against child abuse.
However, his speech yesterday did not include specific commitments, except for a pledge to toughen Vatican laws against online child pornography.
Thomas Schueller, a canon law expert at the University of Muenster in Germany, called Francis’s remarks as “a missed opportunity”.
“Instead of forcefully stating the church’s responsibility from the perspective of the victims, there was the routine and uninspiring roll-out of statements of the obvious,” he told DPA.
Francis said that a Vatican law introduced by his predecessor Benedict XVI in 2010, which criminalised the possession and sharing of lewd images or videos of children under 14, should be expanded to punish material concerning older minors.
But on Saturday, Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), a global advocacy group for abuse survivors, had other priorities as it called for the automatic expulsion from the clergy of all predator priests and bishops who cover up for them.
The ECA sees that as real “zero tolerance” against abuse.
It also called for the publication of a “global registry of credibly accused clergy” and for the Catholic Church to “provide reparation for victims worldwide”.
Francis did not directly respond to those demands.
His speech framed child sex abuse as part of a wider societal problem, noting that perpetrators are “primarily parents, relatives, husbands of child brides, coaches and teachers”, rather than priests.
However, such conduct is “all the more grave and scandalous in the church, for it is utterly incompatible with her moral authority and ethical credibility”, and clergy who engage in it “become tools of Satan”.
The sexual abuse of minors, Francis insisted, “is always the result of an abuse of power”, and church leaders must take responsibility for it, rather than “fall into the trap of blaming others, which is a step towards the ‘alibi’ that separates us from reality”.
“I am reminded too of the cruel religious practice, once widespread in certain cultures, of sacrificing human beings – frequently children – in pagan rites,” he said.
“I make a heartfelt appeal for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors both sexually and in other areas ... for we are dealing with abominable crimes that must be erased from the face of the earth,” the Pope said.
Children must be “protected from ravenous wolves”, he said, adding: “We stand face to face with the mystery of evil.”
The Pope rejected contrasting solutions to the crisis offered by Catholic progressives and conservatives, consisting, on one hand, of an end to the celibacy rule for priests, and, on the other, involving tougher policing against homosexual behaviour within the clergy.
The 82-year-old Pontiff had warned victims to lower their expectations, saying much of the work would be done post-summit.
Swiss victim Jean-Marie Furbringer said: “Honestly it’s a pastoral ‘blabla’, saying it’s the fault of the devil”.
“It talks about the devil, it talks about evil ... there is no talk about permanently excluding child rapists and abusers who are employees of the church,” said Britain’s Peter Saunders, a victim who resigned from a Vatican advisory commission on combating abuse.
“From a child protection point of view it’s been a waste of time. From keeping the world’s eyes on this institution and its failure to protect children, it’s been a great success,” he said.
Writing on Twitter, German child abuse survivor and ECA spokesman Matthias Katsch said “the Pope’s speech is a shameless attempt to put himself at the forefront of the movement [against child abuse], without confronting the guilt and failure, or tackling real changes”.
Francesco Zanardi, survivor and head of Italian victims’ association Rete Abuso, said the Vatican had “lost credibility”.
“We wanted to see measures, to see the bishops (guilty of protecting paedophile priests) named. Start by opening the Vatican archives, not by destroying documents. Start handing documents over to the civil authorities,” he said.
Anne Barrett-Doyle of the US-based clergy abuse tracking group bishopaccountability.org, called it a “stunning letdown”.
“As the world’s Catholics cry out for concrete change, the Pope instead provides tepid promises, all of which we’ve heard before,” she said in a statement.
“Especially distressing was the Pope’s familiar rationalisation that abuse happens in all sectors of society ... we needed him to offer a bold and decisive plan. He gave us instead defensive, recycled rhetoric,” Barrett-Doyle said.
Italian abuse survivor Alessandro Battaglia cried in Saint Peter’s Square along with other victims.
“I did not hear a ‘sorry’ ... I didn’t hear anything, anything concrete, nothing that was fair,” he said. “It is they who destroyed us. This isn’t enough, we are not satisfied.”
Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the organisers of the summit, told journalists that he understood the “frustration” of survivors, insisting “the expectations of victims should also be our expectations, and they are”.
The Vatican has in the past refused to hand over internal documents about abuse cases to police investigating paedophilia.
German Cardinal Reinhard Marx admitted on Saturday that “files that could have documented the terrible deeds and named those responsible were destroyed, or not even created”.
Yesterday Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Australia delivered a homily in the Mass that preceded Francis’s speech, in which he said leaders of the church have been their “own worst enemy” as they turned a blind eye to clergy child sex abuse.
Speaking from the Sala Regia, a grand hall that serves as an antichamber to the Sistine Chapel, Coleridge called for a “Copernican revolution” consisting in “the discovery that those who have been abused do not revolve around the church, but the church around them”.