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Pope seeks to encourage abuse prevention board amid turmoil

Published:Saturday | May 6, 2023 | 1:20 AM
Boston Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, attends a press conference at The Vatican on April 29 last year, after meeting with Pope Francis. Pope Francis yesterday sought to encourage his child
Andrew Medichini
Boston Cardinal Seán Patrick O’Malley, head of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, attends a press conference at The Vatican on April 29 last year, after meeting with Pope Francis. Pope Francis yesterday sought to encourage his child protection advisory board, following weeks of turmoil sparked by the resignation of a founding member and questions about its direction after nearly a decade of existence.

ROME (AP):

Pope Francis sought to encourage his embattled child protection advisory board yesterday, following weeks of turmoil sparked by the latest resignation of a founding member and fresh questions about its direction.

Francis urged his Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors to pursue a “spirituality of reparation” with abuse survivors and build a culture of safeguarding to prevent priests from raping and molesting children.

In particular, he praised the commission’s efforts to establish church child protection programmes in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where there is less funding than in The United States and Europe.

“It is not right that the most prosperous areas of the world should have well-trained and well-funded safeguarding programmes, where victims and their families are respected, while in other parts of the world they suffer in silence, perhaps rejected or stigmatised when they try to come forward to tell of the abuse they have suffered,” Francis said.

Francis announced the creation of the commission in 2013 to provide best-practices advice on combatting abuse in the church. The commission has gone through several iterations in the decade since, most significantly with resignations of members frustrated by the resistance of the Vatican bureaucracy to its recommendations and exasperated about the commission’s unclear mandate and model.

The latest departure was the Reverend Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit who runs a child protection institute at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. In a blistering statement March 29 announcing his resignation, Zollner identified a series of internal problems in the commission that he said made it impossible for him to remain.

He cited a lack of financial accountability, lack of transparency about decision-making and lack of clarity about what members are supposed to do and how they’re appointed. Zollner’s criticisms underscored broader questions about the purpose and direction of the commission, which has never found its place in a Vatican bureaucracy inherently resistant to change and defensive in particular about the abuse dossier.