Mixed messages on Biden reveal not just competing camps, but divided hearts
- Jan 22, 2021
If I were Pope for a day, I’d commission one of the most reliable polling institutes in the world to conduct regular surveys of the global Catholic population on all the issues of importance in Catholic life.
What’s striking one year after Pope Francis’s historic clerical sex abuse summit is how much still isn’t understood.
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.