My Photo
Name:
Location: United States

Thursday, February 11, 2016

Pope Francis and the sex abuse Cardinals

From Newsweek - Vatican Tells New Bishops They Don’t Have to Report Sexual Abuse to Police - and Cardinal Pell has said he's too sick to leave Rome to testify on sex abuse in Australia. And this from the editors at The New York Times: Tracing the Bishops’ Culpability in the Child Abuse Scandal. Here's part of the Times editorial ...

Pope Francis’ commission on the clergy’s sexual violation of children had a timely private screening in Rome last week of “Spotlight,” the Oscar-nominated film about the pedophilia scandal in Boston. The film offers the Vatican, if it will listen, an emphatic lesson in accountability. It dramatizes the decision by The Boston Globe to do more than enumerate the scope of the scandal by reporting on cases involving scores of abusive priests. The scandal was tracked up the church hierarchy to Cardinal Bernard Law, who eventually had to resign his leadership when the news media, not the church, documented his role as a protector of abusive priests.

Hierarchical accountability remains a pressing issue that the Vatican has not fully confronted in the numerous dioceses of the world where the scandal was suppressed. The pope’s 17-member commission presented fresh evidence of this failing when one of its two abuse-victim members, who had gone to the news media to criticize the slow pace of its work, was suddenly suspended on Saturday in a commission vote of no confidence .... Mr. Saunders may have become an impatient and annoying dissident on a commission charged with developing advisory solutions for the problem, but he has a valid point that Pope Francis cannot afford to ignore. Regaining credibility among the church laity requires clear and timely investigation and punishment of prelates who covered up the rape of children with hush money and rotated abusers to new parishes to commit fresh crimes ...


Pope Francis was invited to the Vatican screening of Spotlight, but he did not attend. And meanwhile, Cardinals who are known to have covered up sex abuse, like Brady, Mahony, and Law, have not received even a single word of criticism from Francis, much less any punishment.

- Mahony: Los Angeles Cardinal Hid Abuse, Files Show

- Brady: Irish cardinal refuses to quit amid court case over paedophilia 'cover-up

- Law: Where Is Cardinal Bernard Law Now?

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home