Pope Francis is my most favourite pope of all time. I think he may be the most "pastoral" pope that the Catholic Church has had in a long, long time, even more so than the great Pope John XXIII who convened the Second Vatican Council. So it was with disappointment that I read of the Pope's brief statement to Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper defending the Catholic Church's track record on the handling of sex abuse:
Starting with Pope Benedict's visits to England and Ireland and, most recently, Pope Francis' own address to the Bishops of the Netherlands, the papacy has, indeed, taken steps to tackle the issue of the clergy and sex abuse. Both popes have made the right noises in drawing attention to the suffering of the innocent victims at the hands of clerics and other workers associated with the church and calling for assistance for them. However, the Catholic Church as an institution is far more than the papacy. Nobody knows that better than the Pope himself.
From reports that I have read over the last few years, I have no reason to think that Catholic dioceses throughout the world have done any more than what the local civil laws required of them, even spending millions fighting that in courts of law. As a case in point, I think of the then Archbishop of Quebec who in 2010 fought all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada to have the case against Fr. Lachance dropped, not because he was innocent, but because Quebec's equivalent of a statute of limitations had expired (Shirley Christensen, Appellant and Roman Catholic Archbishop of Québec and Paul-Henri Lachance, Respondents). When the Supreme Court decided that it should go back to a lower court for more evidence, the Archbishop caved in and came to an out of court settlement.
Don't get me wrong. Where there is a libellous, opportunistic accusation it is appropriate, even imperative, to defend a good name in a court of law, but these are the exception.
Maybe the Pope is correct when he says, "No one else has done more," but the optics at diocesan level are still pretty bad. I am reminded of Jesus' statement, "For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the Scribes, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven." Mat 5:20.
Is the Pope going to have to address each and every single Bishops' Conference before they "get it?"
