How to deal with a PR snafu, Bergoglio style...
Pope Francis apologises to abuse victims,
but reaffirms support for Bishop Barros
[But he did not apologize for calling their accusations 'calumny',
only that he should have used the word 'evidence' instead of 'proof'! -
i.e., to him, without 'evidence', the accusations remain nothing but 'calumny']
by Junno Arocho Esteves
January 22, 2018
Pope Francis apologised to victims of clerical sex abuse, saying he unknowingly wounded them by the way he defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering up abuse by his mentor.
Speaking with journalists on his flight to Rome from Lima, Peru, the Pope said he only realized later that his words erroneously implied that victims’ accusations are credible only with concrete proof.
“To hear that the Pope says to their face, ‘Bring me a letter with proof,’ is a slap in the face,” the Pope said.
Pope Francis was referring to a response he gave in Iquique, Chile, when local reporters asked about his support for Bishop Juan Barros of Osorno, given accusations that the bishop may have been aware of abuse perpetrated by his former mentor, Fr Fernando Karadima. The priest was sentenced to a life of prayer and penance by the Vatican after he was found guilty of sexually abusing boys.
“The day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, I will speak. There is not one piece of evidence against him. It is calumny. Is that clear?” the Pope had told the reporters in Iquique.
His response provoked further outrage, especially from Fr Karadima’s victims who said the Pope’s response made his earlier apologies for the Church’s failure to protect sex abuse victims seem hollow.
Asked about the incident during the flight back to Rome, Pope Francis said he meant to use the word “evidence,” not “proof.” The way he phrased his response, he said, caused confusion and was “not the best word to use to approach a wounded heart.”
“Of course, I know that there are many abused people who cannot bring proof (or) they don’t have it,” he said. “Or at times they have it but they are ashamed and cover it up and suffer in silence. The tragedy of the abused is tremendous.”
However, the Pope told reporters on the papal flight he still stood firmly behind his defence of Bishop Barros, because he was “personally convinced” of the bishop’s innocence
after the case was investigated twice with no evidence emerging. [Forgive my cynicism, but was it ever really investigated? I followed the Barros story from the time the first protests were raised against his appointment to Osorno. No such 'investigations' were announced at the time. In fact, the impression was that Bergoglio just wanted Barros installed ASAP, as indeed he was, even if his episcopal consecration Mass was left unfinished because of the protestors in the church and outside it.]
Pope Francis said that while “covering up abuse is an abuse in itself,” if he punished Bishop Barros without moral certainty, “I would be committing the crime of a bad judge.”
[The point at the time, in fact, was for him to at least suspend the nomination until a proper investigation could clear Barros. It would not have been a punishment, just a prudent measure that Barros cannot have resented if he is truly as guiltless as he claims to be. But the pope would not even do that! Why not? In the matter of clerical sex abuse, every priest and every bishop - and yes, the pope - should be, like Caesar's wife, above suspicion.
BTW, it was confirmed that Cardinal O'Malley travelled to Peru to join the pope in Lima shortly after the cardinal issued his 'rebuke' but that this was something previously planned. I don't doubt O'Malley's arrival was providential in preparing what the pope eventually said on the plane to salvage whatever is salvageable of the papal snafu.]
During the in-flight news conference, Pope Francis answered eight questions over the course of an hour, although the conference was interrupted by turbulence, which forced the Pope to sit for about five minutes.
As he did in November on his return from Bangladesh,
he said he only wanted to respond to questions related to the trip. [No, he would not have anyone bring up the Ploumen case, for example!]
Pope Francis told reporters he appreciated the statement made by Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, President of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, acknowledging the pain survivors of abuse felt because of the Pope’s statement about Bishop Barros.
“Words that convey the message ‘If you cannot prove your claims then you will not be believed’ abandon those who have suffered reprehensible criminal violations of their human dignity and relegate survivors to discredited exile,” the cardinal wrote.
He also said, “Pope Francis fully recognises the egregious failures of the Church and its clergy who abused children and the devastating impact those crimes have had on survivors and their loved ones.”
The Pope said he was grateful for Cardinal O’Malley’s statement because it struck the right balance between listing what he has done to show his support for sex abuse victims and the pain experienced by victims because of the Pope’s remarks.
Pope Francis also spoke about the scandal-plagued Sodalitium Christianae Vitae, a Catholic movement based in Peru.
The movement’s founder, Luis Fernando Figari, has been accused of the sexual and psychological abuse of members; he has been ordered by the Vatican to remain in Rome and not have any contact with the movement.
“He declared himself innocent of the charges against him,” Pope Francis told reporters, and he has appealed his cause to the Apostolic Signatura, the Vatican’s supreme court. According to the information the Pope has received, he said, “the verdict will be released in less than a month.”
Pope Francis also was asked about the status of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which he set up in 2014. The three-year terms of its members expired in December and some have questioned whether child protection really is a priority when the commission’s membership was allowed to lapse.
Before the terms ended, he said, the members decided to recommend who should serve a second term and offered the names of possible new members.
The final list, he said, arrived on his desk a week before the trip began “and now it is going through the normal channels in the Curia”.
P.S.
Another trueblue Bergoglian, the Chilean-born editor and founder of the semi-official Vatican website IL SISMOGRAFO, has apparently come out to openly show his disagreement with Bergoglio over Barros, according to this paragraph in a Crux story today about reactions to Cardinal O'Malley's unexpected reaction to the pope's 'calumny' remark:
Luis Badilla, writing in the well-known Italian blog “Il Sismografo”, often labeled as close to the Vatican, published a piece Sunday calling for Barros’s resignation and for the pope to “promptly” accept it, saying that it’s not only the Chilean church that is suffering from the “Bishop Barros War” but the whole Church.
I will check out Badilla's article and translate it in full if warranted. I don't think Badilla will be mollified by the pope's half-apology to the victims but will be consternated to find that Bergoglio is even more firmly behind Barros now!... BTW, Badilla has credentials to speak of, insofar as judging the situation in Chile. He had been a minister in the Allende government overthrown by Pinochet, and has lived in Europe since 1973 when he went into exile, but obviously, has kept up his contacts in Chile. For many years, he worked at Vatican Radio.
Well, no, Badilla was not quite mollified, because he claims in a commentary on the pope's 'apology', that if everything is aboveboard about Barros as the pope claims, why has the Vatican not provided any details in the past two years to clear him? I will translate his new commentary before the first one referred to by Crux. As you will note, however, the Bergoglian in Badilla makes extravagant claims for how the pope responded on the Barros case itself.
P.S. for the day: When lack of transparency
creates most serious problems for the Church
that are avoidable or remediable
by Luis Badilla
Translated from
IL SISMOGRAFO
January 22, 2018
Listening today the responses of Pope Francis on his inflight news conference returning from his South American trip regarding the complex and tragic question of clerical sex abuses in Chile and Peru, but specifically on the case of the Bishop of Osorno, Juan Barros,
certain events have been clarified which up to now had been perceived, narrated and amplified in radically different ways. [I have not seen any reference to those ‘events’ in any of the news reports I have read so far on the latest Bergoglian newsgab, and if they were significant, not previously disclosed facts as Badilla makes them out to be, I do not see how the major news agencies would have left them out at all.]
What happened on this trip of the pope whould be studied in depth especially by the experts responsible for Vatican communications so they can draw the appropriate lessons.
For no apparent reason, the Vatican and the bishops of Chile chose to keep silent for a long time on the Barros issue.
Which is surprising when one listens to what the pope said today, because that silence would seem to be unjustified and self-damaging.
If things were and are as the pope claimed today, one cannot understand why silence was the chosen strategy. It seems like self-damaging behavior.
[What are the reasons anyone might want to keep silent about an issue? Silence would be the most prudent way to go if 1) there is really no defense to offer against accusations and/or 2) the accusations are correct to a degree one may consider damaging because of actual facts or as a result of formal investigations made to verify claims. So take your pick, Mr. Badilla, and use your common sense. An added reason would be, as in the case of ‘the silence of the shepherd’ in the face of the flock’s dubia, to show contempt for those who oppose you in any way.]
Listening to the pope –
who for the first time, explains and clarifies with details that are to the point, precise and authoritative – decisive moments for the priests associated in the past with Fr. Karadima (who has been tried and sentenced both in Chile and the Vatican for sexual abuses and other crimes), one immediately asks:
-
Why were these things not reported to the public at the time they were known with certainty?
-
Why were they kept ‘secret’ unnecessarily, and why was it thought necessary not to be transparent, and above all, why was it decided to marginalize the lay faithful of Osorno knowing that they could have provided an essential contribution to ‘straightening out’ the Barros question?
[Again, ask yourself, Mr. Badilla: who chose to ‘marginalize’ the Osorno faithful? Who chose to ignore all the letters they sent to the Vatican? Who called them dumb and stupid for being ‘led by the nose’ about Barros?]
Why do they continue to think that in 2018, and in the age of the Internet, the Church can continue to communicate as it did 50 years ago, or even centuries ago?
[I don't think the 'silence' had anything to do with that at all! Bergoglio is certainly the last person in the world to hide his light under a bushel - if he really had any such light (advantageous to him) on the Barros case.] To think that way is an anachronism that seriously damages the image of the Church as we have seen in recent decades because of clerical sex abuses that were kept hidden.
In this sensitive matter on the Barros-Karadima case,
some episodes have been made so complicated, chaotic and obscure that today Pope Francis had to justify them, and to do so he had to narrate some things which, had they been published or explained adequately by the Vatican and the Church in Chile in a timely manner, then things would not have proceeded to where we are now. [Yeah, right!]
Perhaps this experience, and these sad events for everyone in the Church – even if not yet definitively clarified – will finally teach that covering up and a lack of transparency does not pay at all today, and will come back with a terrible vengeance.
Here is Badilla’s earlier commentary today – in which however, his call for Barros to resign and for the pope to accept the resignation immediately has been roundly batted out by the pope’s remarks on his airborne news conference as reported by Reuters.
In his comments on the plane, the pope disclosed that Barros had offered to resign twice in recent years but Francis rejected the offers. "I can't condemn him because I don't have evidence and because I am convinced he is innocent," Francis said. He said Barros would remain in his place unless credible evidence is found against him.
One notes Badilla did not reiterate in his new commentary what in his first commentary below he calls the most evident first step that must be taken in order to proceed to an adequate solution for the ‘Karadima-Barros curse’.
A devastated Church community which was once
a luminous part of Latin-American Catholicism
awaits the resignation of Bishop Barros
by Luis Badilla
Translated from
IL SISMOGRAFO
January 22, 2018
In the sad history of the Chilean bishop Juan Barros, weighed down with reiterated accusations of having covered up the repugnant behavior of his mentor Fernando Karadima, the Church in Chile and the Vatican did not always make the right decisions. There have been errors to the present, including during the pope’s visit to Chile last week.
At first glance, one has the impression that he himself had not had the possibility of evaluating in depth what has been happening in Chile and outside it with regard to this problem which has been going on for years and which Chileans have been calling ‘the Barros war’. Now, one also has to consider the statements by Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston [about the pope dismissing victims’ accusations against Barros as ‘all calumny’.]
It is important to bear in mind that there is no room for further errors, and everyone who bears any responsibility of the present state of affairs in re Barros must evaluate the issue with great seriousness. We have now come to the penultimate error in how this issue has been dealt with – and usually, this next-to-last error is more serious even than the straw that will finally break the camel’s back.
It is not just the Church of Chile and the protagonists of this war who are in play. It is the Catholic Church herself, in her totality and in all her parts, that has to live through this experience with anguish and concern, and as the pope has said many times [he has???], no one can feel he is master of the Church. The community that Christ formed does not belong to the pope, to the cardinals or to the bishops. It is for all Catholics, including the lay faithful who many times, matter little, unfortunately.
Yet, in the circumstances of the Barros war, the lay faithful could be decisive for emerging from the swamp ito which this story has fallen. The Catholic Church will never emerge from the tragedy of clerical sex abuses without the support and contribution of the lay faithful.
Right now, we are getting news from Chile that is concerning and certainly, very serious. It seems that some of the Chilean lay faithful engaged in the Barros war, after the pope made his remark about ‘calumny’ against Barros, has take the opportunity to ‘avenge’ themselves against the weak, terrified and vacillating part of the local Church [How exactly, and in just a few hours since the pope made his remark???] which has been trying to give a new life to a wounded Church that has suffered so much and has been in crisis and declining for many decades.
For the Church in Chile, the problem has become the ‘Karadima-Barros curse’ which has already caused serious havoc in the Chilean community, once a luminous part of the history of Latin American Catholicism.
At this time it is evident what the first thing that must be done in order to restore peace and reciprocal respect and embark on an adequate solution: The bishop of Osorno, Juan Barros, must resign, and the Pope must immediately accept it.
[Badilla's bravura proposal apparently did not withstand the pope's explicit statement that he had already twice rejected Barros's offer to resign and will keep him in place until there is 'evidence' of wrongdoing on his part...I will not translate the concluding parahraphs in which Badilla blames John Paul II – along with the bishops he named to Chile and the succession for apostolic nuncios who supposedly gave him ‘wrong advice’ during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship – for having brought about the decline and crisis of the Church in Chile.]
IL SISMOGRAFO has published a letter from the Community of Laymen and Laywomen of Osorno about the recent developments. I shall post a translation when I can..
www.reflexionyliberacion.cl/ryl/2018/01/22/el-papa-no-nos-escucho-el-cardenal-oma...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/01/2018 00:52]