The next leader of the World Catholic Church must place the issue of sexual abuse committed by priests in their papacy, they said Wednesday defenders of the victims, criticizing the legacy of the last three popes.
The Church has been shaken for at least three decades for scandals worldwide related to pedophile priests and covering up its crimes, which damaged its credibility and cost it hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation.
“We believe it should be the central issue of the conclave,” Peter Isely, one of the founders of the SNAP abuse survivors, who presented a website that tracks the allegations of cover -up by high positions of the Church, said in Rome.
The conclave, a secret meeting of Cardinals to choose a new Pope, will begin on May 7.
Pope Francis, who died on April 21, reiterated the promises of “zero tolerance” of his predecessor Benedict XVI and introduced several reforms to address the problem. But its application was irregular, according to activists.
Benedict was accused in a 2022 report of not having taken measures in the alleged cases of sexual abuse when he was a Munich archbishop from 1977 to 1982. The Pontiff, who resigned from the papacy in 2013 and was 94 years old when the report was published, later recognized errors and apologized. He died that year.
Benedict, Francisco and Juan Pablo II also faced criticism for their performance in relation to the deceased American excarnal Theodore McCarrick.
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The history of John Paul II, who directed the Church between 1978 and 2005, was even more tarnished by the accusations that he turned a blind eye to the late Mexican priest Marcial Maciel, a large fund collector for the Vatican who was also a series pedera.
“We are doing everything in our hands (…) to challenge the hierarchy to choose someone who does not have the same story Francisco had, which Benedict had, which Juan Pablo had,” said Sarah Pearson, another representative of SNAP.
The issue of sexual abuse was one of the issues raised by the cardinals in the preparatory debates of the conclave next week, according to the Vatican on Monday.
SNAP and other groups of survivors asked that all predatory priests be expelled from the Church and that the bishops or cardinals guilty of cover -up being stripped of their positions of authority.
Jean Luis Cipriani Thorne, Cardinal sanctioned by sexual abuse, participates in the conversations prior to the conclave, but will not participate in the papal election, since it exceeded the maximum age to vote, 80 years.
Cipriani, who was the most important Catholic cleric in Peru, denies having committed any crime. In January, the Vatican confirmed press information according to which it had been subjected to restrictions “related to its public activity, place of residence and use of badges.”
“This man has no place there (in the conversations prior to the conclave), he has no place there. He is tremendously inappropriate, and this is an example of what happens when a person does not lose his range and title for what he has done,” Pearson said.
With Reuters information
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