In a letter to Catholics worldwide, Aug. 20, Pope Francis condemned the “atrocities” of sexual abuse by church clergy in a “culture of death.”
He called the sexual abuse of minors “by a significant number of clerics and consecrated persons …crimes that inflict deep wounds of pain and powerlessness, primarily among the victims, but also in their family members and in the larger community of believers and nonbelievers alike.”
The Pope wrote, “no effort to beg pardon and to seek to repair the harm done will ever be sufficient.
“We feel shame when we realize that our style of life has denied, and continues to deny, the words (of the Gospel) we recite.”
He committed to a “comprehensive and communal” path to come to grips with the reality of abuse, to take on the pain of the victims and to forge the present and future history of the church.
And he endorsed work underway around the world to ensure the safety and protection of children and vulnerable adults, to implement zero tolerance, and to make accountable both those who perpetuate and those who cover up crimes of sexual abuse.
Pope Francis’ letter came immediately after the release of a report from Pennsylvania that documented 70 years of sexual abuse in the church that ensnared thousands of victims and immediately before a papal visit to Ireland where he faced questions about widespread abuse in that country’s Catholic Church.
His letter contains welcome words after decades of evasion, but what matters is the followup.
Will the Catholic church vigorously root out the “culture of death”?
Spiritual compensation will not be enough for some victims. At stake is hundreds of millions of dollars of church assets that courts may award in lawsuits by the victims of abuse, now that the Pope has admitted culpability.
In 1942, after the British army won the second battle of El Alamein in North Africa, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said, “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
Those words apply to Pope Francis’ commitment to address the long-standing and festering problem of sexual abuse in the church.
In Canada the most prominent instance of systemic sexual abuse by Catholic priests and nuns was in the Indian Residential Schools (IRS).
In 2005, I was engaged by a consortium of 22 law firms to advocate to members of Parliament of all parties for IRS survivors.
One task I did was to organize former residential school students from across Canada to appear as witnesses to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Northern Affairs.
The highest impact came from a grandmother, mother and daughter from a First Nation in Manitoba who testified together one afternoon.
The three women – three generations of the same family – had all been raped as young students by the same priest.
As recently as April, Pope Francis declined to apologize for the church’s role in IRS.
Canadian Catholics could remedy this in the new era.
– Frank Dabbs is a veteran journalist and author.
