The pope’s keen instincts as a communicator have abandoned him at crucial moments, especially in Chile, which is no longer dominated by the church

Please read the full article below By Francis X. Rocca and Ryan Dube Oct. 19, 2018, 11:58 a.m. ET--- See the bold sections for the highlight for limited readers. CM

VATICAN CITY—Pope Francis took charge of the Catholic Church promising a new style of leadership that would make the church more open, candid and dedicated to the vulnerable. His response to the long-running clerical abuse scandal is undermining those goals.

The pope has dismissed coverup allegations from abuse victims and wavered on promised disciplinary reforms. He has struggled to demonstrate a sense of urgency in addressing clerical abuse and has drawn complaints of inconsistency and inaction.

Nowhere has the pope tripped more than in Chile, which once had one of the highest percentages of Catholics in Latin America. Allegations there involve 167 Catholic officials and 178 victims so far. Prosecutors recently raided church buildings, seized documents and arrested a prominent priest, putting the abuse scandal front and center in the pope’s native region.

“The future of the church is in play here,” said Juan Pablo Hermosilla, a Santiago lawyer who represents sex-abuse victims. “What is happening in Chile is very important for the region, and what happens in Latin America is going to be very important for the church.”

Under Pope Francis, Chile is for the first time no longer a majority-Catholic nation. The declining support comes as the Catholic Church vies with evangelical churches across Latin America, the church’s stronghold.

The sex-abuse crisis ... has reignited with a vengeance over a series of new revelations. More than 300 priests in Pennsylvania were accused of molesting more than 1,000 children over decades, in an August grand-jury report that triggered investigations in other states, as well as by the Justice Department.

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former Vatican envoy to the U.S., accused the pope in August of disregarding disciplinary measures imposed on former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick for sexual misconduct and making him an important adviser on bishop appointments in the U.S. The Vatican this month promised an inquiry.

Pope Francis has called a global meeting of bishops, scheduled for four days in February, to discuss clerical sexual abuse.

Greg Burke, the Vatican spokesman, said Pope Francis has made “combating sex abuse by clergy a priority of his pontificate,” by denouncing abuse, taking the advice of victims and furthering efforts to report abusive priests to the police and remove them from ministry.

Defenders of Pope Francis say criticism of him is unfair because most of the cases now coming to light happened long ago. Some say the abuse scandal has been exploited by people who oppose the pope’s calls for expansive immigration policies, his warnings about economic inequality and global warming as well as his leniency on divorce.

The pope has long cast himself as a tribune of the people against oppressive elites, clerical and secular...as a communicator have abandoned him at crucial moments on abuse.

In an open letter this summer to the world’s Catholic faithful, the pope suggested that everyone in the church shared responsibility.

Last Friday, Pope Francis accepted the resignation of Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, D.C., following criticism of the cardinal’s handling of sex-abuse cases during his tenure as bishop of Pittsburgh. The pope also praised the cardinal’s leadership.

“He’s been ambivalent, muddled on sex abuse. It’s not been at the top of his priority list, ever,” said Paul Vallely, a British journalist and author of “Pope Francis: The Struggle for the Soul of Catholicism,” a biography.

Since 2001, church law has required bishops to inform the Vatican about any report of sex abuse of a minor “which has at least a semblance of truth.” As archbishop of Buenos Aires from 1998 to 2013, the future pope referred just two cases to the Vatican, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Among U.S. Catholics, ...Pope Francis ... handling the abuse scandal compared with 62% who said he was doing an only fair or poor job, a recent Pew Research survey found. That compared with 55% who viewed him positively on the issue in 2015.

“I think very few people have faith that the Catholic Church is taking care of this problem,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, a U.S. organization that tracks abuse cases internationally.

Scandal spreads

Chile became a hot-button issue in January, when the pope’s trip there drew attention to victims who had accused Bishop Juan Barros of covering up for an abusive priest in the 1980s. During his visit, the pope said the allegations against the bishop, who is under criminal investigation in another case, were slanderous.

Bishop Barros’s lawyer, German Ovalle, says the bishop is “absolutely innocent” of the accusations.

Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, a top papal adviser with a strong record on combating sex abuse in the U.S., publicly rebuked the pope for causing pain to abuse victims by dismissing their claims. The pope apologized but repeated the charge of slander on his flight back to Rome.

The pope also said the Chilean accusers had never approached him with their abuse complaints. Two weeks later, it was revealed that Cardinal O’Malley had given the pope a detailed letter from one victim more than two years earlier.

Pope Francis in April acknowledged “grave errors,” in a letter to the bishops of Chile, following a Vatican investigation of Bishop Barros. Rather than putting the bishop on trial under church law, he accepted his resignation.

Altogether, the pope has accepted the resignations of seven bishops in Chile and defrocked several prominent priests.

The criminal investigation in Chile has rocked the nation’s chapter of the Marists, a Catholic religious order that runs 12 schools there. Victims accuse church officials at some of the schools of preying on boys over decades.

“There was a system of impunity that allowed this to happen,” said Emiliano Arias, a prosecutor who led a raid on church offices in four cities in September. “I’m certain there are more cases.”

Gonzalo Dezerega, a 53-year-old businessman in Santiago, said he has debilitating flashbacks of being sexually abused as a 10-year-old boy at a school run by the Marists. After each incident, Mr. Dezerega said, his abuser would kneel and pray, calling the child a sinner but assuring him he was forgiven by God. The sins, the boy was told, were to be kept secret.

• “I remember crying, asking the Lord, ‘Why me, why was this happening to me, God?’” said Mr. Dezerega, who only recently told his family.

Gonzalo Dezerega visits the sacristy of a Marist-run school in Santiago, Chile, a room where he said he was sexually abused as a boy.

• Gonzalo Dezerega visits the sacristy of a Marist-run school in Santiago, Chile, a room where he said he was sexually abused as a boy.

• Eneas Espinoza said he was abused in the 1970s at the Alonso de Ercilla Institute, a Marist-run school in downtown Santiago. Prosecutor Raúl Guzmán has identified 26 suspects and 40 victims in cases dating from 1968 to 2016.

• Mr. Espinoza, 45 years old, recalled his school as hell. A Marist brother from Spain would take him out of class and sexually abuse him, Mr. Espinoza said. Afterward, the brother would instruct the 6-year-old boy to brush his teeth.

  • As an adult, Mr. Espinoza said, he associated brushing with abuse and avoided it, eventually losing most of his teeth.

In September, a canonical probe conducted by the Vatican concluded that the abuse accusations at the Marist schools were credible. The congregation said two of its members have confessed. One prominent cleric, who has denied abuse allegations, was among those defrocked by Pope Francis.

A representative for Chile’s branch of the Marist order said the schools now have policies to prevent abuse and were “absolutely safe” for children.

Polls show the scandals have a role in Chileans falling away from the Catholic Church. In August, 46% of respondents identified as Catholic, pollster Cadem found, compared with 63% in 2017; about three-quarters of Chile’s population in the 1990s identified as Catholic. The poll also found 96% of Chileans believe the church covered up or protected clergy accused of sexual abuse.

• Eduardo Rozas, 54, said he was a young abuse victim at one of Chile’s Marist-run schools.
• Isaac Givovich, 38, said he was sexually abused when he was 6 years old by a Marist brother in Santiago.

“The church knows better than anyone that it has been wrong,” President Sebastian Piñera said at a Mass last month to mark Chile’s independence day.

In the beginning

In 2013, when Pope Benedict XVI became the first pontiff to resign in nearly six centuries, the world’s cardinals gathered in Rome to choose a successor who would drive through changes after several corruption and mismanagement scandals. Addressing the festering clerical sex-abuse crisis was also seen as urgent, particularly in the English-speaking world.

From the moment the new pope stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s on the evening of March 13, attention instead centered on Pope Francis as the first pope from Latin America—a leader with a disarmingly informal style who toned down the teachings on sexual and medical ethics identified with his predecessor to focus on poverty, migration and the environment.

The new pope said little of the sex-abuse crisis during his first year. He voiced impatience with critics on the subject, telling an interviewer in early 2014: “The Catholic Church is perhaps the only public institution to have acted with transparency and responsibility. No one else has done more. And yet the church is the only one attacked.”

Some people say the pope has had a blind spot about clerical sex abuse since he was Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, in his country of Argentina.

“In my diocese it never happened to me,” then-Cardinal Bergoglio said in a book-length interview published in 2010, referring to cases of clerical pedophilia. In another book, he suggested his archdiocese successfully filtered out candidates for the priesthood who might abuse children.

When victims of abuse went public in Argentina, he refused to meet them. In 2006, as head of the Argentine bishops conference, he denounced what he called a media campaign against the Rev. Julio Grassi, founder of a well-known orphanage who was accused of abusing children under his care. Father Grassi was eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison, a verdict upheld last year by Argentina’s highest court.

In March 2014,** the pope established an advisory panel on child protection, at the urging of Cardinal O’Malley of Boston. The panel included two prominent abuse victims-turned-advocates**, which raised hopes of greater influence from laypeople. The panel proposed a special tribunal for trying bishops accused of covering up or neglecting abuse by priests.

**The pope accepted the recommendation and the Vatican announced the decision in 2015. The tribunal wasn’t set up. Instead, the pope amended church law the following year to specify that bishops’ negligence in abuse cases was grounds for dismissal.

The pope’s change of mind was a disappointment for Marie Collins**, a well-known victim of clerical sex abuse who served on the advisory panel. She resigned last year, complaining of Vatican inaction, and was joined by Peter Saunders, the other panel member who had been an abuse victim.

The pope told reporters he had spoken with Ms. Collins and heard her concerns. Ms. Collins said they had no such conversation.

“He has done nothing really to give confidence back to people that the church has a grip on this issue,” Ms. Collins said. “He’s made these statements about zero tolerance and then not operated zero tolerance.”

Mr. Dezerega, the Chilean businessman who was abused as a boy, ... “We want a new and clean church,” he said, “without criminals.”
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On the face of this article, the sin, sexual abuse, crime, and coverup continues under the watchful eye of this Pope (Francis). I will hold my piece to hear first from my fellow CD Users. This is horrendous! Please read or re-read my other postings on this subject matter. In view of this article, what says ye? CM

PS. Longtime crimes call for a long article. Take the time to read about it.