The President of the Centre for Child Protection (CCP) at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, Fr Hans Zollner SJ, last week accused the church of not shouldering responsibility for its sins, writes Christa Pongratz- Lippitt in The Tablet.
Speaking at a meeting in Bonn organised by the German Commission for Contemporary History, entitled “Dark Spaces: The Church and Sexual Abuse”, Fr Zollner said he failed to see a clear sense of responsibility and accountability in the church and he had wondered why that was. Was the church incapable of assigning clear tasks and taking responsibility? he asked.
He also asked himself why the church asked individual Catholics to confess their sins and atone for them when the church itself as an institution failed to do so.
He admitted that the church was changing but the change was far too slow, he said. The same procedure of denying and refusing to come to terms with clerical sexual abuse was still evident in church communities the world over, he said, adding: “Very often, the church leadership only reacts if pressurised from outside [by the secular world].”
At the German bishops’ conference’s plenary last month Fr Zollner emphasised that in future those responsible in any way for clerical sexual abuse would have to step down.
“We may have to force resignations by using public pressure – but it will happen. Whosoever has incurred guilt, stands accountable and must accept responsibility,” he said.
The church was not a special world of its own, he maintained, and it must ask for and publish names. “Who made the abuse possible? Who was responsible?”
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