In a speech at the end of a Mass in which prelates had offered a “mea maxima culpa,” Francis put the Church’s sexual abuse crisis in historical and cultural context. Studies find most sexual abuse happens in the home, he said. And pornography and sex tourism are also scourges in the world. He warned against “justicialism provoked by guilt for past errors and media pressure, and a defensiveness that fails to confront the causes and effects of these grave crimes.”
The pope was speaking to bishops as a pastor, not issuing guidelines—a few of those were announced at the conference’s conclusion. But as Francis spoke, I couldn’t help but think that his contextualizing underscored and even exacerbated one of the deepest divides in the Catholic world today: Between the expectations of victims in the United States—who want “zero tolerance” for convicted abusers—and the way the Vatican conceives of the crisis. [...]
One of the biggest unresolved flashpoints here is the concept of “zero tolerance.” Many victims’ groups in the United States, France and elsewhere are calling on the Church to issue a “one-strike” policy of defrocking priests convicted of abuse and bishops on whose watch priests abused. The term “zero tolerance” was not used much at the conference, and was not in a series of 21 “reflection points” the pope asked participants to consider. If anything, the conference seemed to back away from the idea of defrocking, tending instead to focus on the idea of removing a priest from ministry in some cases rather than removing him from the clerical state.
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