It’s okay for Pope Francis to look more deeply into the causes of the sexual abuse scandal in Chile, but it will take centuries to produce meaningful change, one outrage at a time. If however, the plan is to claim they only now realize the scope of the issue, then it is the only way to address the issue without exposing decades, if not centuries, of complicity.
While it appears Pope Francis wants to address the issue of sexual abuse of children in the Catholic Church, he is attempting to do it without causing (any additional) harm to the Church’s reputation. This is a plan to merely weather the storm, not to actually make things right. Given the depth and breadth of the problem, it’s doomed to failure….
Pope Francis did an amazing thing, for a pope, that is. He declared that the “culture of abuse and cover-up”, as it pertains to the sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church, must end. The statement was made in a letter to the Catholics of Chile, where a sex abuse scandal has been on display for the whole world to see unfold.
The same disparity that enables exploitations like this to occur also keeps them from getting exposed. This is how it has always been. Except now the balance of power has shifted. There is strength in numbers and courage inspires yet more courage. The flood is far from over and hopefully will continue until a true shift in society’s passive acceptance of this kind of behavior is finally burned away.
That might as well be what the Republicans have been saying for all the years they’ve blocked the Child Victims Act (“CVA”). Relying on a set of talking points (given them by lobbyists) they stall for time. By acknowledging that justice for survivors is an important issue they are studying, they try to placate activists. Then they qualify it by saying it is a more complicated issue than we imagine. Yet, they assure us, they are actively discussing it in conference and will come up with a solution that is fair to everyone, given enough time to do their job.
As I was listening to the teenagers who so eloquently and passionately spoke at the March For Our Lives today, I realized there are a host of similarities between the efforts to reform gun laws and those to reform statutes of limitation for child sex abuse, especially now that the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who survived the mass shooting last month have elevated the issue in the consciousness of Americans voters….
OMG, you poor thing!
What a miscarriage of justice it would be for the richest & most powerful institution the world has ever known to be forced to make amends for sex crimes against children & covering them up for decades. After moving sexual predators in your employ from one exploited hunting ground to the next unsuspecting one, destroying lives that might have been happily lived but for atrocities committed by so-called men of God, you think you should get a free pass. That is the definition of chutzpah.