Sexual abuse and Francis’ call for an “all-out battle” against pedophilia in the Church

The bone sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic Church, especially cases where the victims were minors, began to be publicly exploited while John Paul II was still alive. Not only that, but the schemes and manipulations to conceal them have been revealed.

The Catholic Church has been rocked by countless scandals of child sexual abuse in the last three decades. An independent investigation published in October 2021 revealed that there were 216,000 victims of sexual abuse, in cases committed by the clergy of France between 1950 and 2020. In Australia, a high-level investigation into the sexual abuse of children in institutions revealed in 2017 that 4,444 alleged cases of abuse they had been denounced to the authorities of the Church. On almost no occasion have they been investigated.

A study of the German Bishops’ Conference in 2018 revealed that 1,670 clergy had committed some form of sexual assault against 3,677 minors between 1946 and 2014. It was clarified that it was very likely that this number was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the actual cases were surely much higher. In UNITED STATESin one of perhaps the best-known investigations, the newspaper THE boston globe exposed the massive scale of child sexual abuse in the Diocese of Boston and the resulting cover-up.

There came a time when the accumulation of testimonies and worldwide outrage meant the Vatican could no longer look the other way. Intense media coverage of pedophile priests has led to a further examination of Church practices is needed.

Benedict XVI he pushed through groundbreaking changes in Church law to make it easier to oust predatory priests, dismissing hundreds of them, while being the first pontiff to meet survivors of abuse. Despite these advances, many victims believe he fell short. “In our view, Pope Benedict XVI is taking decades of the Church’s darkest secrets to his grave,” he said. Associated Press SNAPthe leading US-based group for survivors of clergy abuse.

For this reason, after his resignation, the one who had to take up the gauntlet went to francisco. The greatest setback in his fight against abuse within the Church was when he appointed John Barros as bishop of the Chilean diocese of Osorno in 2015, even though he had been Companion of the most famous pedophile priest of the South American nation -Fernando Karadima– and having been singled out by victims, who said they witnessed what was happening and ignored the abuse.

Francisco defended Barros during his trip to Chile in January 2018: “The day they bring me evidence against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not a single piece of evidence against him. Everything is slander. It’s clear?”.

The outrage in Chile and abroad increased. Back at the Vatican, Francis ordered an investigation which determined that he had been misinformed about the matter. He apologized to the victims and admitted “serious mistakes” after reading a 2,300-page report on abuses in Chile.. On June 11, 2018, Barros had to resign from the bishopric.

In February 2019, Francis convened a summit of Church leaders that ended with a call “to a merciless battle against child abuse“and insisted that the institution must protect children”raptor wolves”. A few weeks after this meeting, he published a new canon law, requiring for the first time that Church officials are reporting the abuse charges to Vatican prosecutors. Francis then issued a rule that it required all officials to report allegations of abuse or attempted cover-ups to their superiors.

In December 2019, the Vatican said that would abolish the high level of secrecy it applied to allegations of sexual abuse against clergyending a policy that had shielded priests from criminal sanctions: By removing this veil of confidentiality, the Roman Catholic Church has made it acceptable, but not mandatory, to report information about alleged abuse to the courts.

These restrictions had further exacerbated decades of abuse and discouraged victims from coming forward, while facilitating cover-ups. But the Vatican had previously argued that the imposition of papal secrecy was necessary to protect both the victim and the accused.

In June 2021, a team of UN special rapporteurs for the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) sharply criticized the Vatican, accusing it of obstructing and not cooperating with legal proceedings in the cases of sexual abuse of children in Catholic institutions. They also said they were concerned about steps taken by the Church to “protect alleged abusers, hide crimes, block accountability of alleged abusers, and avoid compensation due to victims.”

That same month, Pope Francis updated the Penal Code of the Catholic Churchthe Code of Canon Law. The change made headlines around the world: it added guidelines to punish crimes of sexual abuse of minors by priests. This reform had been demanded for years by victims and activists against pedophilia.

The review of criminal penalties came after repeated complaints from victims of sexual abuse and others that the code’s previous wording was outdated and lacked transparency. The new code does not explicitly detail sex crimes against minors, but refers to crimes against the Sixth Commandment, which prohibits adultery. It says a priest will be removed from office and given “other just punishments” if he commits such crimes with a minor. The priest who incites or incites a minor to “expose himself in a pornographic manner or participate in pornographic exhibitions” will also be punished.

“The new text introduces various modifications to the current regulations and sanctions certain new criminal offences, which respond to the increasingly widespread need in the various communities to see the justice and order restored that crime has shattered,” Francisco wrote. . The changes came into effect in December 2021.

Francis was elected pope ten years ago, in particular because of his desire to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. Since his appointment, he meets regularly with a cabinet of cardinal advisers who help him draft these changes to implement them, such as the preach the gospelwhich gives new institutional weight to the efforts of fight against sexual abuse in the Church.

The document was released in March 2022, the ninth anniversary of his papacy. At the end of January, approaching his tenth year as pontiff, Francis recognized during an interview with PA that the Catholic Church still has a long way to go to solve the problem. He said of his approach to child abuse cases: “No loose reins with minors, reins get pretty tight”.

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