The Vatican will work with the Portuguese Church on the issue of sexual abuse “at the appropriate time,” the Commission appointed for this purpose by the Pope, which does not rule on cases that are outside its “direct jurisdiction,” told Lusa.
“We will work with the Church in Portugal at the appropriate time, as with all local Churches, and we hope to share the fruits of this commitment in due course,” the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors responded to Lusa’s questions. agency.
Regarding the latest cases of complaints received by the Independent Commission created by the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, the Commission stated that its policy “does not provide for comments on issues that are beyond” its direct powers.
“The new Commission has just been appointed by the Holy Father and will meet soon to follow the Pope’s instructions on prevention, training, support for victims/survivors and report on this area of the life and ministry of the Church,” he adds. the organism
The commission’s chairman has been Cardinal Sean Patrick O’Malley since 2014, a priest known for his battles with pedophile priests in the Boston diocese.
“Over the years, he fought a lot even against Pope Francis’s own resistance, who sometimes tended to play down complaints,” Vatican geopolitics professor Piero Schiavazzi, from Link Campus University in Rome, told Lusa. .
In recent years, independent investigative commissions to shed light on cases of harassment and abuse in the Church have proliferated across Europe, collecting hundreds of complaints.
According to Schiavazzi, these commissions are the result of “a change in mentality in the Church itself”, which previously focused on “minimizing, covering up, hiding, not so much to defend pedophiles, but because the main need of the Church was not to give scandal”. , because even if there is a small stain, it was always a lack of respect for all the good that hundreds of thousands of healthy priests do in the world”.
“They feared that the scandals would compromise the image of the clergy and that people would no longer take children to catechism, parishes and oratories,” Schiavazzi said.
To initiate this change, the Pope asked the bishops to open their doors to the complaints of the faithful.
“The problem was that the protests against the Church increased because the victims were treated as guilty and accused of having invented everything,” said Schiavazzi, citing the Chilean case as an example of “bad management”, with cases of cover-up in which even Pope Francis said it was “slander”.
When evidence came out of a 2018 case of a priest accused of serial rape being covered up, Francis ended up apologizing and dismissing all of Chile’s clergy leaders, a “turning point, when the pope decides to allow episcopal conferences to meet.” establish”. independent commissions of inquiry”.
To date, independent commissions have been created in Portugal, France, the Netherlands, and Spain, all of which have collected hundreds of cases.
The Italian Episcopal Conference has not instituted any process, despite the multiplication of calls in Italy for this Italian institution to take this step in favor of the victims.
In all Italian dioceses “listening centers” have been created for victims of abuse in which “assistance and shelter” are offered, but which do not replace complaints to the judicial authorities, Archbishop Lorenzo Ghizzoni of Ravenna told Lusa. -Cervia, who is president of the National Service for the Protection of Minors and Vulnerable Persons of the Italian Episcopal Conference.
If in Italy it is difficult to take root the idea of an independent commission on abuses, in Portugal the investigation took on political implications after the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, commented on the investigation saying that “400 cases of abuse” are a figure “particularly high”, statements for which he apologized.
According to Schiavazzi, the Portuguese president “is under pressure” to organize the International Youth Day, which is celebrated in Lisbon next year.
“DIJ is like the Olympiad of the Church, Catholic countries compete to win it, it is an event that focuses the attention of the world’s media on that country because the Pope goes there and young people from all over the world arrive. Portugal and the Portuguese president do not want to run the risk of the scandal escalating and the IJD being a fiasco because children from other countries decide not to go”, he argued.
For the analyst, “it was a declaration of national political interest” by Marcelo, who “certainly does not want to cover up or help pedophiles.”
Source: TSF
