Pope Francis sought to encourage his child protection board on Thursday to proceed helping victims, as latest developments outside the Vatican underscored that the Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse scandal isn’t going away anytime soon.
Francis met along with his Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which is predicted to soon release the first-ever audit of safeguarding procedures and policies church-wide.
But as that report is being compiled, church officials in Switzerland reported a surge in victims coming forward for the reason that September publication of a bombshell report that found over 1,000 cases of abuse for the reason that mid-Twentieth century in a rustic with a comparatively small Catholic population.
The diocese in northwestern Basel, for instance, reported that greater than half of the suspected 183 cases within the last 13 years emerged within the last six months. Swiss news agency SDA-Keystone reported a minimum of 70 other cases across 4 other dioceses for the reason that report was issued.
Closer to home, a criminal court in Sicily handed down a crucial verdict this week against a priest whom the Vatican apparently exonerated on a technicality even after one among his victims wrote to Francis, begging for him to intervene.
The case was being closely watched since Italy’s Catholic hierarchy has only recently and reluctantly begun confronting its legacy of abuse in a rustic where the difficulty continues to be somewhat taboo.
The verdict by the tribunal in Enna sentenced the priest, the Rev. Giuseppe Rugolo, to 4 and a half years in prison for attempted sexual violence and violence-related charges against three minors. The court also held his diocese, Piazza Armerina, Sicily, liable for paying civil damages and legal fees, in line with the sentence on Tuesday.
Piazza Armeria Bishop Rosario Gisana was caught on intercepted wiretaps confessing to having covered up for the priest. But a lawyer for the diocese, Gabriele Cantaro, stressed in a press release Thursday that the liability didn’t stem from the actions of Gisana or his predecessor, but merely from the diocese’s general responsibility for the actions of its priests.
According to the newspaper Domani, which covered the case closely, the Vatican’s sex abuse office shelved the case on technical grounds because Rugolo was only a seminarian when the abuse occurred. The Vatican’s in-house norms on the time only called for canonical sanctions against priests who abused minors, not seminarians.
Il Messaggero newspaper reported in 2021 that one among Rugolo’s victims wrote to Francis directly, begging him to intervene after he and his parents had spent years attempting to get the church to take motion against Rugolo, who was sent to a diocese in northern Italy after the accusations were raised.
Amid Italian media coverage of the case, Francis on Nov. 6 heartily praised Gisana when the bishop led a bunch of pilgrims to the Vatican.
“This bishop is great. He was persecuted, calumnied but he’s been firm, all the time correct, an accurate man,” Francis said in remarks that outraged victims’ advocates.
Francis told his child protection advisers on Thursday that listening to victims was crucial to helping them heal.
“In our ecclesial ministry of protecting minors, closeness to victims of abuse is not any abstract concept, but a really concrete reality, comprised of listening, intervening, stopping and assisting,” he said in remarks read by an aide as Francis continues to get well from the flu.
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Associated Press author Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed to this report.
