Pope Francis yesterday opened a landmark Vatican summit on fighting child sex abuse, calling for “concrete measures” and handing top Catholic bishops a roadmap to tackling paedophilia in the church.
“The holy people of God looks to us, and expects from us not simple and predictable condemnations, but concrete and effective measures to be undertaken. We need to be concrete,” he said as the summit opened, the first of its kind.
“Hear the cry of the little ones who plead for justice,” he said as the three-and-a-half day meeting began. Francis handed out a 21-point list of “guidelines” which included suggestions such as drawing up mandatory codes of conduct for priests, training people to spot abuse and informing police.
Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the summit’s organisers, described the proposals as “a roadmap for the future development of policy” which “governs all aspects of getting it right”.
The ongoing scandal has again escalated into a crisis which has touched many countries across the globe, with recent cases affecting Chile, Germany and the US.
The 82-year-old pontiff hopes to raise awareness about abuse through prayers, speeches, working groups and testimonies from victims. The summit, he said, was a moment to “turn this evil into an opportunity for awareness and purification” and “heal the grave wounds that the scandal of paedophilia has caused, both in the little ones and in believers”.
Those gathered heard from unnamed abuse survivors, one of whom told them: “You are the physicians of the soul and yet, with rare exceptions, you have been transformed in some cases into murderers of the soul, into murderers of the faith”.
Another, a woman, described the horrors of being forced to undergo three abortions after being raped by a priest.
The summit aims to educate 114 top bishops who will then return home with clear ideas on how to spot and deal with abuse and paedophilia.
“We humbly and sorrowfully admit that wounds have been inflicted by us bishops on the victims and in fact the entire body of Christ,” Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle told the assembly.
“Our lack of response to the suffering of victims, even to the point of rejecting them and covering up the scandal to protect perpetrators and the institution, has injured our people, leaving a deep wound in our relationship with those we are sent to serve,” he said. The scale of the task has been further complicated by the fact that some churches, in Asia and Africa in particular, deny the problem exists.