BY SHAY CULLEN
JESUS of Nazareth said the child is the most important of all. If we continue to fail children, we fail Christ.
The established institutional Church and many members – laypeople and priests – have spectacularly failed to care, protect, help, support and compensate the innocent vulnerable children for heinous crimes against them. Many of the bishops, priests and laypeople have over the years denied, covered up, transferred abusive priests, lied and forced child victims to shut up.
The most recent, shocking exposes and revelations of clerical child abuse in France led to a pilgrimage to Lourdes no less, by clergy to confess their incompetence to protect children. What they and clergy everywhere need to do is to surrender their absolute power and invite independent prosecutors to investigate all the priests and lay suspects against whom credible allegations of child sexual abuse have been made. The culture of silence in the Church is the shield of the abusers.
The chronic lying and cover up by some clergy in authority about the extent of child abuse and turning a blind eye to it as if children had no rights resulted in as many as 216,000 children being abused by French pedophile-priests alone from 1950 until 2020.
The silence of bishops and other priests makes them accessories to the crimes. It is a conspiracy of sorts because charging a priest in court with such crimes is unthinkable, embarrassing and scandalous for the institutional Church.
Bishops and priests and lay persons must first care for the child victims and should stop coddling and protecting pedophile-priests. The good honest clergy and lay people defenders of children should be angry as Jesus was at abusers and give them the Mill Stone of Justice (Matthew 18:6) to help them repent, confess and accept it as penance. Then, mercy and forgiveness can follow. That is the elementary lesson of Jesus Christ. The number of French children sexually abused is 330,000 when we add in the abuse by Catholic laypeople. It is a worldwide problem.
Child abuse and cover up is a shocking abuse of power that has to be removed. This is because the institution is male-dominated and there are no women with positions of authority and leadership to hold the diocesan leaders to account.
The role that Jesus gave to the apostle and bishop were to be the washers of feet, servants of the poor and healers of the abused. He said that the tyrants of the heathens ruled with total authority but it must not be like that among you.
He said, “Whoever among you wants to be great must become the servant of you all, and if he wants to be first among you, he must be your slave- just as the Son of Man has not come to be served but to serve, and to give his life to set many others free.”
How many clergy obey that command, we may ask. To stop child sexual abuse by clergy, the power structure must change. Pope Francis has denounced this abuse of power as clericalism. (To be continued)/PN
