Confession of child abuse by the Catholic Church, 1

BY FR. SHAY CULLEN 

IT IS ONLY the truth that will set all free from the terrible secrets and crimes of clerical child abuse. Justice will only give some comfort to the suffering victims. The harm can be healed but never undone.

Pope Francis has enacted instructions and church laws that demand bishops admit mistakes and stop protecting pedophile priests and to hand them over to the civil authorities. Many refuse to do so.

However, the Swiss Bishops Conference decided that the better strategy than continued silence and denial of the continuing revelations in the media of widespread clerical child abuse was to come clean after decades of secrecy and clerical abuse cover-up.

They commissioned an independent research by the University of Zurich into clerical child abuse some time ago and are now facing the truth, as the world is, at the thousands of victims of clerical abuse revealed by the study’s partial results.

The bishops and church authorities must now be truly repentant, remorseful, ask forgiveness and take responsibility for the abuse and cover up. They must bring the clerical abusers to justice and compensate the victims. Will the Philippine hierarchy follow the Swiss, the Portuguese and French bishops’ example of contrition and confession of sins past and present and commission an independent investigation? 

The University of Zurich research study commissioned by the Bishop’s Conference into church archives uncovered unpleasant undeniable truths of clerical abuse that are only the tip of the huge iceberg of abuse, the researchers say. They were unable to access much of the archives. Some diocesan files were destroyed. It was a controlled research.

“Given what we know from research on the dark figure of crime, we assume that only a small percentage of cases was ever reported in the first place,” according to the researchers Ms. Dommann and Ms. Meier.

A victim/survivors group said: “For decades, the authorities of the Catholic Church in Switzerland have covered up these crimes, protecting the perpetrators and the reputation of their institution at the expense of the victims who were silenced.”

Child abuse in the church and outside of it, is a centuries-old crime, previously seldom ever recognized, trivialized, denied, condoned, tolerated, covered-up, and hidden away. Complaints and cries for help and justice were subdued with threats and punishment of victims and the perpetrators went free. Two thousand years ago, Jesus of Nazareth condemned child abuse and called on his followers to bring child abusers to account and severely punished.

Today, most bishops with known pedophiles hiding in their diocese ignore that strong uncompromising declaration for justice for child victims by Jesus himself as found in Matthew 18:6-7 (Also in Luke 17: 1-2 and Mark 9:42 ). That abuse continues in the world, and most grievous of all, in the very institution that was founded to protect, defend, shelter and heal victims- the Christian Church.

As reported in a previous column, the clerical child abuse committed by some few pedophile clergy stains the reputation of the many virtuous, dedicated and committed priests and brothers and laypeople that are the majority of church members and live lives of virtue, self-sacrifice and work for human rights and dignity.

Many priests have given their lives for their people and are besmirched by the tolerance and protection by some church authorities of the clerical child abusers. This throws a dark cloud of suspicion over many good priests and we must stand up and speak-out and call for an end of such church tolerance. (To be continued)/PN