With the mass resignation of 34 Chilean bishops, we have reached the decisive moment of the Francis pontificate. How Pope Francis responds to this unprecedented gesture will determine how history judges him. Obviously, these dramatic resignations test the pontiff’s commitment to resolving the sex-abuse crisis. But there is even more at stake.
The resignations switch the focus of public attention from the Chilean hierarchy — which had clearly failed in its duties — to the pope. The Chilean bishops explained that they had decided to put their future “in the hands of the Holy Father and will leave it to him to decide freely” which prelates should step down. Now, which bishops will the pope dismiss, and which (if any) will he allow to remain in office?
Presumably some of the Chilean bishops are innocent of the “grave negligence” uncovered by the pope’s belated investigation. For now, they share in the general humiliation. Will they be exonerated? And will those who have been guilty of outright dishonesty (the pope cited the “destruction of compromising documents”) be identified and denounced? Or will the pope merely accept some resignations, and decline others, without public explanation?
When Francis was elected, the Catholic world was clamoring for accountability in the handling of sex-abuse complaints.
The pope signed orders creating a tribunal to judge bishops accused of neglect — but then, after months of inaction, dissolved that body, explaining that existing mechanisms already allowed for disciplinary action against bishops. Yet in the Chilean case, those mechanisms were not used; instead the pope took action unilaterally. So there still is no indication that the Vatican has a working system for holding bishops accountable.
A bishop’s resignation, quietly accepted, does not establish his guilt or innocence. On the contrary, to allow the Chilean bishops to step down without comment would cast an unfavorable light on those unfortunate prelates who have a perfectly valid reason — such as ill health — for an early resignation.
The mass resignations in Chile also leave unresolved the status of one powerful prelate at the center of the scandal. Cardinal Javier Errazuriz, who had already resigned from his post as archbishop of Santiago (having passed the normative retirement age of 75), remains a member of the Council of Cardinals, the body that advises the pontiff.
Cardinal Errazuriz did not take part in last week’s discussions in Rome, nor did he join in the mass resignation. Yet he has been accused of seeking systematically to suppress information about sexual abuse, and to discourage Vatican officials from listening to victims. How long can he remain among the pope’s closest advisers, while other Chilean bishops bear the brunt of the scandal?
Taken by themselves, then, the dramatic resignations resolve nothing. Marie Collins, who last year resigned in frustration from the pope’s special commission on sexual abuse, responded to the Friday resignations with a weary tweet:
“Chile: No resignation from Cardinal Errazuriz? No removal from the C9? No bishop removed — all allowed to resign. Really nothing changes.”
Along with accountability, concerned Catholics wanted transparency in the Vatican’s handling of abuse cases.
So far, there is no transparency in this case. The Vatican released a short, mild letter from the pope to the Chilean bishops, holding back a longer and more candid message, in which the pope provides a more detailed indictment of the bishops’ behavior. (The latter message quickly leaked to the media, but leaks — as Vatican officials should know — are not a means of encouraging transparency.)
We don’t even know whether Pope Francis demanded resignations, or whether the Chilean bishops decided to resign en masse as a way of tossing their problems back onto the pontiff’s desk.Were they pushed, or did they jump?
In his longer letter the pope indicates that some bishops should be removed, and adds, “I insist, it’s not enough.”
It seems unlikely that every member of a nation’s episcopal conference would agree to resign without prompting.
And it is evident that Pope Francis was angry about the “lack of truthful and balanced information” he had previously received from Chile. But it was not only the Chilean bishops who bore responsibility for creating the crisis. As the pope has acknowledged, he himself was “part of the problem,” and he too was, and is, on trial in the court of public opinion.
Like so many other sex-abuse complaints, the scandal in Chile can be traced back for decades: to 1985, when bishops heard the first complaints about Fr. Fernando Karadima. Those complaints were suppressed until 2010, when reluctant bishops finally took action against the popular priest, and in 2011 Karadima was condemned by a Vatican tribunal.
It was after that verdict — after Karadima had been sentenced to a life of prayer and repentance — that Pope Francis promoted one of Karadima’s close associates, Bishop Juan Barros, to a diocesan see. When that promotion drew protests in Chile, and Barros offered to step aside, the pope doubled down, saying that the complaints against the bishop were “unfounded allegations of leftists.”
More recently, on his visit to Chile in January, the pontiff went still farther, characterizing the charges against Bishop Barros as “calumny” and claiming that he had never received solid evidence of wrongdoing. Soon it emerged that the pope had received a detailed complaint against Barros, hand-delivered to him by Cardinal Sean O’Malley. Apparently he had not taken it seriously.
Without question, Pope Francis was given inaccurate information by the Chilean bishops; he had ample reason to be angry with them. In his unpublished letter to the bishops, he revealed that his investigators had found evidence of dishonesty, of covering up abuse, of transferring guilty priests from one diocese to another.
But can the pontiff have been unprepared for this sort of episcopal dishonesty? Was this not the same pattern that had emerged fifteen years earlier, when the scandal erupted in the United States? Throughout his pontificate, Francis has regularly acted as if he had not been fully briefed on the sex-abuse problem.
Pope Francis has been consistent in his calls for a decentralized, synodal approach to Church governance. But this solution to the Chilean crisis — the resignation of an entire episcopal conference, apparently at the pope’s bidding — looks anything but collegial.
The CEO of a multinational corporation might ask for resignations from all his vice-presidents, but
for the pope to take such an action suggests an understanding of papal authority quite removed from the role of the “first among equals,” the bishop who strengthens the brethren in faith.
Management style aside, we have reason to be uneasy about the pastoral focus of a pontiff who, in the public version of his letter, urged the Chilean bishops to continue working for a “prophetic Church, capable of putting at the center what’s important: the service to her Lord in the hungry, the imprisoned, the migrant, the abused.”
Surely that service to the needy is an intrinsic part of the Church’s mission. But the prophetic service of the Church must also be mindful of the Lord’s reminder that man does not live on bread alone.
Sandro Magister gives details that reveal what amounts to a less than fullhearted commitment by this pope to fairly and equitably resolve the ecclesial crisis in Chile in general, and specifically, the tolerance for and cover-up of clerical sex abuses that some, if not most, of Chile's bishops have been guilty of - going by what the official Vatican media have chosen to report, and more importantly, not to report about the issue. Just as this pope has chosen not to directly address the latest misdeeds of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whose totalitarian excesses Bergoglio appears to tolerate.
Vatican mysteries:
The pope censors himself on Venezuela,
and a mutiny by the bishops of Chile
May 22, 2018
The glitches, the silences, the inconsistencies of the Vatican communications media often reveal serious divisions at the highest levels of the hierarchy. This is what has happened in recent days, in at least two pressing cases.
One of these concerns Venezuela. Against the background of the disaster into which the country has plunged and in the run-up to the false elections for reconfirming in power the heir of Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, there erupted last week a revolt - which was harshly repressed - in the El Helicoide prison in Caracas, a place of detention and torture for political prisoners whose crime is that of having opposed the regime.
At the news of the revolt, the Archbishop of Caracas, Cardinal Jorge Urosa Savino, and then the Venezuelan episcopal conference, appealed “to the state, to its responsibility for the life and well-being of all persons imprisoned.” And at the Vatican,
the Secretariat of State judged it opportune for Pope Francis to speak out as well, at the end of the Regina Caeli on May 20, the Sunday of Pentecost.
In fact, here is the text of the appeal provided to journalists accredited to the Holy See one hour before the pope spoke - under embargo until the moment when the text was spoken, to be compared with what the pope would actually say.
“I would like to dedicate once again a special consideration to beloved Venezuela. With the help of the Holy Spirit, may all work to find just, effective, and peaceful solutions for the grave humanitarian, political, economic, and social crisis that is exhausting the population, and avoid the temptation of resorting to any kind of violence. I encourage the authorities of the country to guarantee respect for the life and well-being of every person, especially those who, like the imprisoned, are under their responsibility.”
But then, when he addressed the crowd present in Saint Peter’s Square, Francis did not read the text he was holding in his hands. He looked up and improvised these words:
“I would like to dedicate a special consideration to beloved Venezuela. I ask that the Holy Spirit give the whole Venezuelan people - all, leaders, people - the wisdom to find the path of peace and unity. I also pray for the prisoners who died yesterday.”
Very disappointing words for Venezuelans, precisely because once again,
the words are so indulgent - like other times in the past - toward the regime of Maduro, for which the pope avoided any direct call to responsibility, which instead was explicit in the severe words that the Secretariat of State provided and that he set aside.
The other case concerns Chile and the convocation in Rome of the 34 bishops of that country to answer before the pope for the sexual abuse committed for years by dozens of consecrated ministers against numerous victims, with the complicity of not a few bishops who in turn were publicly defended by other bishops, cardinals, and, until a few months ago, by Francis himself, before his U-turn and an in-depth investigation he ordered carried out in Chile, the 2400 pages of the accusatory report that came out of that investigation, his personal meeting in Rome to listen to three of the main victims, and, in short, his aligning himself with the “
santo pueblo fiel de Dios” (holy faithful People of God) against the sins of the ecclesiastical apparatus.
The hearing in Rome, although it was carried out behind closed doors, was followed with dogged determination by the media all over the world and had its key moments in the 10-page “J’accuse” that Francis delivered to the Chilean bishops on May 15, and in the final decision of almost all of them to place their mandates back in the hands of the pope so that he could decide whether to confirm or remove each one.
There were 34 bishops in all, 3 of them emeritus, and 29 of them submitted a letter of resignation to the pope. Two of them thought they should not take part in the mass resignation: one because of his special ties to the armed forces of Chile - the military ordinary and president of the episcopal conference Santiago Silva; and the other, Luigi Infanti della Mora, bishop of the Apostolic Vicariate of Aysen, which is directly under Propaganda Fide [the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith which oversees all dioceses in places considered mission territory].
Among the three emeritus bishops, only one of them, Juan Luis Ysern, wrote a letter of resignation, saying it was for the sake of solidarity with his confreres, while the other two did not, including Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz Ossa, who is on the Pope's advisory council of nine cardinals.
What is striking is that
not only did L'Osservatore Romano not publish the 10-page letter that Francis delivered to the Chilean bishops, nor the statement with which these virtually resigned, but it did not even report on either statement.
In the seven days from May 12 to 19, the Vatican press office only issued three meager bulletins on the meetings between the pope and the Chilean bishops.
The first and third were reproduced - in shortened form - by the OR. Not, however, the second, a very brief bulletin dated May 15, and
the only one that mentioned “a text with a few issues on which to meditate” that Francis delivered to the bishops, without saying anything about the contents of that text.
As for the final statement with which the Chilean bishops surrendered their mandates to Francis, this was not covered by the press office, at all, much less by the OR.
Almost all of the worldwide media judged the “resignation” of the Chilean bishops as an act of pained but docile submission to the pope.
One exception to this, however, was a very special observer, Luis Badilla, a Chilean journalist who worked for years at Vatican Radio, has an excellent rapport with Fr. Federico Lombardi, and today is the director of a news and commentary website, “Il Sismografo,” which still gravitates in the Vatican orbit, acting as a para-official Vatican news site during this pontificate.
After publishing the pope's 10-page “J’accuse” on May 18, three days after he gave it to the Chilean bishops, Badilla commented in no uncertain terms:
“This document blew apart a sort of nonsensical showdown that part of the Chilean episcopate, under the leadership of Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz and the Opus Dei bishop of San Bernardo, Juan Ignacio González were hoping for with an arrogant and aggressive attitude, as was seen in the various statements by the two prelates to the international media while they were in Rome.
“The majority of Chilean bishops arrived at the Vatican just as they had been behaving in Chile for a number of years: divided and organized into cliques, arrogant and puffed up with sentiments of superiority, convinced that they were more clever than everybody else, and above all convinced that they would get the better of the pope, whom they treated in public with great deference and respect but in private called an exaggerated and melodramatic person, like someone who is using this situation to blow it out of proportion and cover up other crises of his pontificate.”
On the other hand, the brief letter - made public by official Vatican sources - with which Francis took his leave of the Chilean bishops at the end of the encounter, was judged by Badilla as resolute on the whole, but also “apparently”
too “cautious and meek” and “according to some, not up to the gravity of the question,” referring to “all the changes” that the pope himself says would have to be brought to completion “in the short, medium, and long term.”
Badilla's comments and the silences of OR on the subject lead one to think that Pope Francis was deeply dissatisfied with how the Chilean bishops concluded their stay in Rome, foisting onto him the burden of deciding about each one of them, in a sort of “mutiny.”
It is the word that only the Vaticanista Franca Giansoldati used in her report for the newspaper
Il Messaggero:
In a surprise move - for the first time in the history of the Church - an entire episcopate has announced its intention to resign en bloc, from the first bishop to the last, placing their mandates in the hands of the pontiff.
It was in a certain way a slap in the face for Francis, almost as if it were a response to the unusual methods that he has used […] by convoking all of them in Rome, in a sort of lineup that risks delegitimizing, reflexively, the entire body of bishops, as if all 34 of them were conspirators, whitewashers, and liars...
In the face of this the Chilean bishops stood up for themselves. Responsibilities are individual, not collective. So all of them gave up their positions ‘so that the pope may decide freely for each one.’... Certainly many Chilean bishops do not want to be taken to be among those who have covered up grave crimes.”
On the evening of Tuesday, May 22, the Vatican press office announced that Pope Francis will meet in Rome from June 1 to 3 with a new group of victims of sexual abuse in Chile, without ruling out other “similar initiatives in the future.”
In the 10-page accusatory letter handed by the pope on May 15 to the Chilean bishops, two passages stand out.
The first is the one in which the pope states that he has set to work a “special commission” of investigation and analysis on the crisis of the Chilean Church:
“In this area, hearing the opinions of various persons and after noting the persistence of the wound, I have created a special commission so that, with freedom of spirit, in a juridical and technical way, it may offer a diagnosis as independent as possible, as well as a clear view on past events but above all on the state of the current situation.”
The second is in the 25th of the 27 notes that accompany the ten pages of the text. In it, Francis cites three accusations from the final report of the “misión especial” - made up of Maltese archbishop Charles Scicluna and Vatican official Jordi Bertomeu - that he sent to Chile in February to interview the victims of sexual abuse committed by consecrated ministers with the complicity and coverup of bishops and cardinals.
Here is the complete text of the note:
“Once again, in this sense, I would like to dwell on three situations that emerge from the report of the ‘Special Mission’:
“1. The investigation demonstrates that there are grave defects in the way of managing the cases of ‘delicta graviora’ that corroborate some disturbing information that began to become known in some Roman dicasteries. Above all in the way of receiving the complaints or ‘notitiae criminis,’ because in many cases they have been superficially classified as implausible, but were instead serious indications of an actual crime.
In the course of the visit it was also noted that there were presumed crimes that had been investigated late or not at all, with the resulting scandal for the complainants and for all those who knew the presumed victims - families, friends, parish communities.
In other cases, it was noted that there had been very grave negligence in the protection of vulnerable boys and girls, on the part of bishops and religious superiors, who have a special responsibility in the task of protecting the people of God.
“2. Other similar circumstances that caused perplexity and embarrassment for me was reading statements that attest to the pressure exerted on those who were supposed to carry out the evidentiary portion of the criminal proceeding, or the destruction of compromising documents by persons entrusted with the ecclesiastical archives, demonstrating in this way an absolute lack of respect for canonical procedure as well as the existence of reprehensible practices that should be avoided in the future.
“3. In the same direction and as confirmation that the problem does not belong to only one group of persons, in the case of many abusers it has been shown that there were already serious problems in the phase of their formation at the seminary or in the novitiate. In fact, the proceedings of the ‘Special Mission’ record serious accusations against some bishops or superiors who are believed to have entrusted these educational institutions to priests suspected of active homosexuality.”
Even more revealing however is the account from Corrispondenza Romana
adelantelafe.com/el-frio-trato-de-francisco-a-los-obispos-c...
of how 'coldly' the pope dealt with the Chilean bishops during their three days in Rome.
It is an account, however, that discounts the possibility that the mass resignation was something orchestrated by the Vatican for show, as I had surmised rashly. It appears to have been a genuine reaction by the bishops in response to the blanket accusations levelled against all of them.
Their first meeting with the pope - at which he handed them his 10-page letter - only lasted half an hour. The next two meetings he spent listening to each bishop 'react' to his letter, but not privately - each bishop had to speak in the presence of the other bishops. The pope did not meet with any of the bishops privately. And apart from paying 2,000 euros towards each bishop's air fare to and from Chile, the Vatican left the bishops to fend for themselves in Rome (except for allowing four of the oldest bishops to stay at a residence inside the Vatican). Clearly he was castigating all the bishops as if everyone were equally guilty of the misdeeds reported in Mons. Scicluna's report.
But the report does not explain why even the pope could not prevail on Cardinal Errazuriz to attend the meetings when he, of all people, was greatly responsible for the crisis when, as Archbishop of Santiago and Primate of Chile, he set the example of covering up for erring priests and discounting victims' complaints against them. Why is the pope apparently shielding Errazuriz from public blame and accountability?
And throughout all this, no one has reported on what Mons. Barros and the three other bishops who, like him, were proteges of the infamous Fr. Karadima, had to say for themselves - considering that in January 2015, all four had been expected to go on sabbatical to help ease tensions caused by the much-protested appointment of Barros to the Diocese of Osorno. A decision Bergoglio revoked on the improbable pretext that Barros had prematurely informed the other three bishops of the plan proposed by Bergoglio's Nuncio in Santiago to defuse the situation at the time.
Some Vaticanista ought to compare this episode with Benedict XVI's handling of the sex abuse crisis in Ireland back in 2010-2011 when at least 3 Irish government investigations into clerical sex abuses in that country (dating back to the 1930s in the case of many Irish schools run by religious orders where physical and psychological abuse was rampant) focused media attention on the Irish Church. He, too, convoked the Irish bishops at the Vatican to confront the issue, then followed it through with a historic letter to the Catholics of Ireland in March 2011, in which he addressed everyone concerned - bishops and priests, abusers and victims,their families and all Irish Catholics - asking them not just to make sure that any such abuses end and that victims be assisted fully but also to make Church-wide spiritual reparation for all the misdeeds that had been committed.
Yet Benedict XVI was denounced in the Irish Parliament by no less than the Irish Prime Minister at the time for failing to act on clerical sex abuse in Ireland (never mind that the government reports were about abuses committed before 2002 when the CDF was first authorized to look into clerical sex abuse cases that were not handled properly or at all by the local bishops).
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/05/2018 08:56]