POPE FRANCIS HAS revived his lapsed sex abuse advisory commission by naming new members, after coming under fire for his overall handling of the scandal and his support for a Chilean bishop accused by victims of witnessing and ignoring their abuse.
The announcement of the new members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors came on the same day that a Vatican investigator took the testimony in New York of one of the main whistleblowers in the Chilean cover-up scandal.
Francis tasked Archbishop Charles Scicluna with the fact-finding mission into Bishop Juan Barros after he came under blistering criticism in Chile for defending Barros and calling the victims’ cover-up accusations against him slander.
The initial three-year mandate of commission members had lapsed two months ago, on 17 December. Francis named nine new members today and kept seven from the initial group. A Vatican statement said survivors of abuse are included, but didn’t identify them to protect their privacy.
None of the most outspoken lay advocates for victims from the original group returned, but a statement stressed that the commission’s work would be imbued throughout with the experience of victims.
Commission members are to open their April plenary by meeting with victims privately, and discussions are continuing to create an “international survivor advisory panel” to advise the commission and make sure the voices of victims are heard in all its deliberations, the statement said.
The new members are noteworthy for their geographic representation, hailing from Tonga, Brazil, Ethiopia and Australia, among other places.
“The newly appointed members will add to the commission’s global perspective in the protection of minors and vulnerable adults,” said Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the commission’s president.
‘Zero tolerance’
Francis has insisted he has “zero tolerance” for abuse and had pledged to hold bishops accountable when they botch cases. But there have been several well-known cases where he and the Vatican sided with the accused over victims, calling into question whether he shares the “victims first” policy that guides his own commission’s work.
The Barros case is the most prominent example. Victims of Chile’s most notorious predator priest, the Reverand Fernando Karadima, have for years accused Barros of witnessing their abuse, ignoring it and defending Karadima.
En route home from Chile, though, Francis insisted he had no “evidence” against Barros to warrant removing him. The Associated Press, though, reported that he received a letter from a Karadima victim, Juan Carlos Cruz, in April 2015 detailing the abuse he suffered and Barros’ presence while it happened.
Francis’ defiant defence of Barros suggested that he find Cruz or the other victims credible, and believed instead Barros’ ecclesial supporters in Chile and at the Vatican.
Cruz testifies today before Scicluna, who was the architect of the Vatican’s get-tough approach to sex abuse in the early 2000s. Several recent cases, however, indicate that the Vatican under Francis doesn’t favour the “one strike and you’re out” approach adopted by the US bishops, for example, after the scandal exploded there in 2002.
Francis himself has admitted that he opts to give offenders the benefit of the doubt, especially when solid proof — often hard to come by in decades-old sex abuse cases — is lacking.
“As must be done in good jurisprudence, always in favour of the offender,” he told reporters on 21 January, while en route home from South America.
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