Clergy sexual abuse survivors on Monday unveiled a proposed recent church law calling for the everlasting removal of abusive priests and superiors who covered for them, as they stepped up their outrage over Pope Francis’ selection to move the Vatican office that investigates sex crimes.
The global advocacy group End Clergy Abuse unveiled the draft law at a press conference following days of protests across the Vatican, and before taking their complaints to the U.N. in Geneva. They are in search of to attract attention to the continued scandal within the Catholic Church and the failure of Francis and the hierarchy to make good on years of pledges of “zero tolerance” for abuse.
Specifically, the survivors have expressed astonishment at Francis’ nomination of an old friend and theologian, Cardinal Victor Fernandez, to take over as prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, given Fernandez’s record handling cases as bishop in his native Argentina.
When Fernández was bishop of La Plata, Argentina, he refused to promptly remove certainly one of his priests, Eduardo Lorenzo, who was repeatedly accused of abusing teens. Ten years after a victim first got here forward, and hours after learning that an Argentine judge had ordered his arrest, Lorenzo was found dead in 2019 in what was ruled a suicide. Fernandez had stood by Lorenzo and officiated at his funeral.
The Vatican office that Fernandez now heads has processed priest abuse cases globally since 2001, meting out church punishments which can be never more severe than being defrocked, or “reduced” back to being a layman. After bullish years under the late Pope Benedict XVI, who defrocked nearly 850 priests in a decade, the office in recent times appears to have taken a more lenient approach as cases poured in from across the globe.
Francis himself had a giant learning curve on abuse, arriving on the Vatican in 2013 claiming to have never handled a case after which botching a giant scandal in Chile in 2018. He did an about-face, vowed “zero tolerance” for abuse and marshalled through a recent church law holding bishops accountable after they cover up cases.
But recently, the momentum appears to have waned, transparency has remained elusive and victims have sensed a backsliding — perhaps none more so than in Francis’ nomination of Fernandez to move the Vatican’s sex abuse office.
“We easily went back 10 years on this issue this week,” said Peter Isely, a founding member of each End Clergy Abuse (ECA) now and its U.S. partner organization, SNAP.
One of Lorenzo’s victims, Diego Perez, was in Rome this week and said he couldn’t consider Fernández was now in control of the office that processes abuse cases globally.
“Surely he shouldn’t be on this position,” Perez told reporters.
Fernandez acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press earlier this yr that he made mistakes within the Lorenzo case, saying he must have removed him from ministry earlier and treated his victims higher. He blamed his own inexperience and what he said were unclear church procedures.
The online resource BishopAccountability.org has documented two other cases that it said showed Fernandez stood by his priests moderately than their alleged victims.
Francis made Fernandez a cardinal on Saturday, after telling him in his letter of appointment that he wouldn’t should handle abuse cases personally in his recent Vatican job. Francis said the office’s small discipline section, headed by an Irish priest, would handle the dossier, although the dimensions of the issue has long cried out for authoritative, high-ranking leadership in a hierarchy still proof against removing abusers.
The proposed recent church law that ECA unveiled on Monday calls for any priest who commits a sexual offense against a minor or “vulnerable adult” to be dismissed from the clerical state. Any bishop or religious superior who fails to report sex crimes to law enforcement would even be removed.
Janet Aguti, an ECA member from Uganda, said the cover-up of clergy abuse cases in Africa is even worse than elsewhere due to the stigma of sexual crimes and the exalted status that priests have in African communities. That makes it hard for victims to return forward, much less find justice from the state or church authorities, who typically respond by moving abusers to recent dioceses, she said.
“They (priests) have helped us to construct schools, they’ve helped us to construct hospitals. And you don’t need to be the primary to return out and point fingers at them because then the community goes to show against you,” she said.
Organizers said they’ve tried in various ways to get the text of the proposed “zero tolerance” law into Francis’ hands, including via a high-profile cardinal helping to run the Vatican’s big meeting of bishops this month, Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich.
Hollerich told organizers he’d give Francis a replica in December.
