Vatican admits sexual abuse undermines the Church’s credibility

An official document for the Synod in October of this year explicitly accepts a loss of credibility due to the clergy sexual abuse crisis.

Although credibility has been at stake since the sexual abuse crisis exploded, this is the first time a Vatican document officially admits its pervasive effects.

In Spain, the Catholic bishops announced a plan to offer reparations to victims of clergy sexual abuse, but it is not clear how they will do so.

By Rodolfo Soriano-Núñez

This week the issue of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church became a priority at the global scale and even more in Spain.

At the global scale, the most recent document of the ongoing Synod, a meeting of bishops and other church officials that has happened with certain regularity in the Roman Catholic Church since the early seventies, gave prominence to the issue when it acknowledged the risk of not paying attention to the causes and consequences of clergy sexual abuse.

In the Spanish-speaking world, the Conference of Bishops of Spain heralded a plan to compensate the victims of dead predator clerics and even the victims of crimes that have already prescribed there.

If the Spanish bishops are up to the task they have set, theirs would be a first in the Spanish-speaking Catholic world, where the Catholic hierarchy has been playing, since the 1980s, a game of hide-and-seek.

The overall assumption was that the issue only existed in the English-speaking world, despite the prominence of cases such as Marcial Maciel’s in Mexico, and Carlos Miguel Buela’s in Argentina.

Not that those are the only two cases, but those are two of the most prominent cases and where it is easier to trace links between the two sexual predators and the English-speaking world.

In Maciel’s case the links between him, his order, and the U.S. and Irish hierarchy have known since the late 1990s. It was because of the work done in the United States by Jason Berry, that in the Spanish-speaking world and more precisely in Mexico, it was possible to know what was happening in the so-called Legion of Christ in the United States and in Mexico.

Maciel had used the links between the Mexican elites and their U.S. counterparts to expand the reach of his order. First, in the diocese of Rockville Centre, in the state of New York, and from there to the U.S. Eastern seaboard, and other places in that country.