As cardinals prepared to enter the Sistine Chapel on Wednesday afternoon to elect a pope, groups representing survivors of sexual abuse by priests made last-minute appeals for the next pontiff to definitively resolve the crisis, which has shadowed the Roman Catholic Church for decades.
The best way forward, the groups said, was to impose a zero-tolerance policy on transgressors and those who covered up for them, and for church leaders to own up to their own mishandling of abuse cases.
“We want to work with the next pope to put an end to clerical abuse,” Peter Isely, a member of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, said Wednesday at a news conference.
In March, the group launched a website tracking each cardinal’s record in dealing with credible allegations against priests under his watch. Few in the upper echelons of the church’s hierarchy are without blame, the group claimed.
On Friday, Matteo Bruni, the Vatican spokesman, said the cardinals had discussed sexual abuse in the run-up to the conclave and considered it a “wound to be kept open” so awareness of the problem remained alive and solutions could be identified.
SNAP also presented a road map for the pope’s first 100 days, describing steps its members think he should take to resolve the crisis.
SNAP is only one of several survivors groups to have arrived in Rome since Pope Francis died on April 21, hoping their message will resonate with the cardinals.
One international group, Ending Clergy Abuse, or ECA, echoed Martin Luther’s radical 1517 call for church reform on Tuesday evening when it brought a manifesto — titled the 95 Theses of Survivors — to the front door of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican office that handles most abuse cases. They did not nail it to the door, but tried to slip it between the doors.
“I rang the doorbell but they didn’t answer,” said Gemma Hickey, the president of ECA, who is a survivor of abuse. It was not until they started reading the document out loud that the door opened and an official took it. “He didn’t say anything, but it was received, so I was happy with that, even if it was just symbolic.”
Francesco Zanardi, the founder of Rete L’Abuso, Italy’s largest survivors’ group, said at a news conference on Tuesday that the church laws promoted by Pope Francis to guide bishops in handling abuse were often thwarted in Italy because national laws do not force bishops to report cases of abuse to law enforcement officials.
Speaking out against clerical abuse is not always without consequence. Ann Hagan Webb and Anne Barrett Doyle, of BishopAccountability.org, an archive and advocacy group, said the police stopped them when they were walking near the Vatican office that handles abuse cases holding photos of two cardinals whose records on punishing abusers have drawn scrutiny.
“They told us we couldn’t carry signs,” Ms. Barrett Doyle said. The police officers took photos of their documents and called other police officers before letting them go after about 45 minutes. “At least they didn’t arrest us,” she said.
Under Pope Francis, the Vatican took decidedly stronger steps than it had in the past to counter sexual abuse.
Francis issued the church’s most comprehensive law yet to hold clerics accountable if they sexually abused children or vulnerable adults, or if they covered up abuse. And he apologized to survivors on many occasions, acknowledging their pain. But critics have said that the measures were not enough and often were not applied because of resistance within the church.
Source link
