Top Vatican official says celibacy, homosexuality not cause of abuse crisis
- Dec 14, 2019
Though Pope Francis’s high stakes anti-abuse summit has not yet yielded any major policy moves, one message was clear throughout the four-day gathering: the problem of child sexual abuse is a global one, and no one can leave thinking it’s not a concern in their own backyard.
A major challenge the planning committee for Pope Francis’s Feb. 21-24 summit on sex abuse will face is taking account of differing instincts inside a global Church.
For Americans and Catholics from other places scarred by clerical sexual abuse scandals, it’s almost incomprehensible that a global summit of bishops could pull back from endorsing a policy of “zero tolerance.”
Among other take-aways, the case of Luis Fernando Figari and his Sodalitium Christianae Vitae illustrate the need for lay movements to get the same oversight as dioceses and religious orders.
In part one of a three-part series, Elise Harris examines the rise to power of Chilean Cardinal Francisco Errazuriz and why he may be the next test Pope Francis faces in terms of accountability for clerical sexual abuse.
Jesuit Father Hans Zollner, a leading anti-abuse expert and a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, called a report documenting hundreds of cases of physical and sexual abuse at a German boys’ choir “shocking,” and warned that as the taboo lifts in other parts of the world, similar accounts are likely to keep emerging.