Robert’s ‘zero tolerance’ position on clerical sex abuse is going no where very fast.
Quote:Pontiff maintains public silence as fresh explosion of clerical sex abuse scandals makes headlines
Pope Leo XIV is embracing a non-interventionist policy in tackling clerical sex abuse, even in prominent cases when a bishop has promoted a convicted predator priest and the Vatican has reinstated a cleric convicted of child pornography.
While Leo is drawing thousands of tourists to papal audiences at his summer residence, a fresh eruption of clerical sex abuse scandals in Europe is prompting victims and their advocates to question Leo’s inaction on the issue of sexual misconduct among priests.
Leo has yet to respond to a leading German victim support organization asking him to include laymen and women in the Dicastery for Doctrine of the Faith to help deal with abuser priests; the 18 priests in the DDF, they say, “cannot prosecute cases of abuse all over the world.”
Eckiger Tisch, who expressed outrage over the Cologne archdiocese’s refusal to compensate Melanie F, a girl whom Fr. Hans Ue adopted as foster daughter and repeatedly raped, resulting in two abortions, has also asked Leo to open the Vatican archives to inquiries.
In a July 11 op-ed, The Pillar questioned Leo’s non-intervention after Catholics expressed outrage over the promotion of Fr. Dominique Spina, a French priest who was sentenced in 2005 to four years in jail for raping a 16-year-old boy in the early 1990s. The Vatican did not defrock Spina.
The archbishop of Toulouse, Guy de Kerimel, sparked headlines after he promoted Spina as archdiocesan chancellor on June 2. Kerimel defended Spina’s elevation to the top position in the diocesan bureaucracy, claiming that he had “chosen the path of mercy.”
Spina forced a high school student from an abusive home, who wanted to become a priest and who relied on him as a spiritual guide, into oral sex and other acts.
Spina’s promotion comes in the wake of the high-profile case of the late Fr. Henri Antoine Grouès, a celebrity priest known as an advocate of the poor and founder of Emmaus International. He sexually assaulted multiple women between the late 1970s and 2005.
An independent report published July 9 revealed 12 new accusations of assault were levied against Grouès, bringing the number of accusers up to 45. Seven of the latest accusations were allegedly committed against minors. Grouès, popularly known as Abbé Pierre, died in 2007.
On July 2, a French parliamentary inquiry published its report about rape, sexual abuse, and violence at Notre-Dame de Bétharram, a private Catholic school in southwestern France. It is thought to be the biggest school child abuse scandal in French history.
The 330-page report is a result of 200 complaints filed since February 2024, accusing priests and staff of abuse from 1957 to 2004. A victim named Boris, who was sexually assaulted on his fourteenth birthday by principal Fr. Pierre Silviet-Carricart, labeled the school “a supermarket for sexual predators.”
Meanwhile, the Vatican has given a job and housing at the residence for papal ambassadors to another predator priest, who was previously sentenced to five years in prison for possession and exchange of child pornography.
“If [Leo] truly wants to break this network — and not just with generic declarations — he will have to start by explaining why a convicted priest like Capella remains under the Vatican roof.”
Even in Leo’s adopted country of Peru, the archbishop of Lima is boasting that he enjoys the pope’s confidence and expects to remain in office for five more years despite accusations of bungling the case of Fr. Nilton Zárate Rengifo. Zárate is accused of sexually harassing a nun, solicitating sexual favors in the confessional, asking her for intimate pictures, and seeking mutual masturbation during a phone call. He has not been subject to a formal canonical disciplinary procedure.
https://stream.org/pope-leo-xiv-adopts-h...r-priests/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
