The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors yesterday released its second report, which highlighted victims’ calls for accountability, transparency and genuine reparation. Source: CNS.
It urges the Church to move beyond “empty gestures” and face its moral duty to prevent abuse, support survivors and rebuild trust.
To improve the Church’s safeguarding approaches and measures, the commission said it relied on extensive input and feedback from victims/survivors in its second annual report.
As a consequence, the report features a chapter listing more than 20 major concerns drawn up by its victim/survivor focus group, which included: an ongoing lack of accountability for Church leaders and resistance to safeguarding reforms; the risk of retaliation and rejection for whistleblowers; the continued ministry of known perpetrators; the need to vet all Church personnel properly; and the need for a “mature approach” to reparation.
“The primary need from victims/survivors is not financial compensation but rather recognition of harm, genuine apologies, and meaningful action to prevent future abuses,” the report said.
“In many cases, however, victims/survivors report that the Church has responded with empty settlements, performative gestures, and a persistent refusal to engage with victims/survivors in good faith,” it said.
“Figures of authority within the Church who perpetrate or enable abuse have perhaps viewed themselves as too essential and important to be held accountable.
“The Church believes herself to be central to God’s plan for humanity, but God’s promises to the Church are not a ‘too essential to fail’ free pass of impunity: to the contrary, the Church needs to remember that judgment begins within the household of God.”
The papal commission’s Annual Report on Church Policies and Procedures for Safeguarding is meant to serve “as both compass and chronicle in the Church’s global pilgrimage toward accountability,” Archbishop Thibault Verny of Chambéry, France, president of the papal commission, wrote in the document’s introduction.
Each year, the report focuses on a different set of bishops’ conferences, religious institutes and offices of the Roman Curia, and this year’s report also included a lay association: the Focolare movement.
FULL STORY
Survivors warn papal commission that abusers, retaliation still a problem (By Carol Glatz, CNS)
