Safeguarding expert Fr Hans Zollner SJ is urging Catholics to make prayer for abuse victims a central focus this Lent, saying the Church’s spiritual response to sexual abuse remains underdeveloped. Source: OSV News.
The director of the Institute of Anthropology at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University said that while safeguarding policies and research have grown, prayer for victims and secondary victims is often overlooked.
Fr Zollner spoke as cases of abuse made global news, with French abuse survivor Gisèle Pelicot meeting Queen Camilla on Monday, and with two high-profile figures – Andrew Mountbatten Windsor and Peter Mandelson, former British ambassador to the United States – arrested due to their connections with Jeffrey Epstein.
Many cases connected to Catholic priests, including high-profile ones, such as Fr Marko Rupnik, are also ongoing.
Asked for a Catholic response to such harrowing cases, Fr Zollner, one of the world’s top experts in sexual abuse and safeguarding, with research spanning more than two decades, said while “canonical, psychological, or sociological analysis” in the Church is much needed and developed, one aspect is still lacking in broader Catholic response to abuse in general: prayer. – and Lent is the best time to remind about it.
Fr Zollner said “a spiritual reckoning and a spiritual way of understanding” abuse is something everyone in the Church should be paying attention to.
“We pray for the poor, we pray for the homeless, we pray for the sick – but when do we pray for victims?” he asked.
“Our discovery over the last months has been that more and more people are aware that the spirituality of safeguarding, and the theology of safeguarding in the face of abuse, is very much underdeveloped,” Fr Zollner said.
“Very often, I ask participants at conferences: ‘When did you pray for victims of abuse last time?’ Most of the time, there is a dead silence after that question, and many people say that they didn’t think about it.”
He said days of prayers once a year are not enough.
“When do we pray for victims? For secondary victims? When do we pray for perpetrators? When do we pray for Church leaders who have to deal with these situations?” he asked.
The Institute of Anthropology in Rome has announced it will offer a series of Lenten reflections focused on safeguarding, underscoring its longstanding commitment to integrating safeguarding awareness into the Church’s spiritual and liturgical life.
FULL STORY
Father Zollner: Catholics need to pray more for survivors of sexual abuse (By Paulina Guzik, OSV News)
