Month: February 2023

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Over 4,800 children sexually abused in Portugal’s Catholic churches since 1950: ‘Tip of the Iceberg’

By Samantha Kamman

Priests and others within the Portuguese Catholic Church sexually abused more than 4,000 children over the past 70 years, and more than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse are still active in church roles, investigators estimate.

An investigation report published this month by the Independent Commission for the Study of Child Sexual Abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church found that priests and others have likely sexually abused 4,812 children within the church since 1950.

Through an online survey, investigators validated 512 victim witness statements and “estimate that the 512 victims knew of or were in contact with close to 4,300 other victims.”

“[T]he vast majority of cases took place on more than one occasion against the same child, to many thousands of instances of abuse,” the report states.

In a statement, Bishop Josè Ornelas apologized for the church’s failure to grasp the extent of the problem, promising more transparency in the future.

“We have heard things that we cannot ignore. It is a dramatic situation that we are living,” he said, adding that child sex abuse is a “heinous crime.”

The commission, founded by child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, began its investigation in January 2022 after Ornelas, president of the Portuguese Episcopal Conference, invited Strecht to form the commission.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” Strecht told SIC television, according to Reuters.

In 96.9% of cases, the abuser was male. The abuser was a priest in 77% of cases.

In 46.7% of cases, the abuser and the victim were acquainted with one another, with the average age of abuse victims being 11.2 years, according to the report.

The investigation found that boys were more likely to be victims than girls, with the former accounting for 57.2% of cases and the latter accounting for 42.2%. In 65.8% of cases, the commission reported no actions were taken to stop the abuser. However, over three-fourths (77%) of the victims never complained to people within the church or organizations. Only 4.3% of victims took their cases to court.

“The data on the incidence of sexual abuse uncovered in the ecclesiastical archives must be seen as the ‘tip of the iceberg,'” the report states. “It was thoroughly demonstrated that an indeterminate number of victims did not report the abuse to the Catholic Church.”

The report found instances of abuse in 129 districts across the country. The highest abuse rates were reported in Lisbon, Porto, Braga, Santarém and Aveiro.

While some incidents of abuse happened outside of the church (such as boy scout meetings), 23% of the incidents happened at a seminary. Other instances occurred at unspecified locations (18.8%), and 14.3% occurred at a confessional. Another 12.9% of abuse cases happened at a rectory, and 6.9% occurred at a religious school.

The type of abuse the victims endured varied, but most of the abuse consisted of “manipulation of the sexual organs, masturbation, oral and anal sex as well as full copulation.”

“In most cases, victims stressed that after the abuse had occurred they were expressly asked or ordered to ‘keep it secret,’ abusers commonly resorting to various forms of blackmail, often by threatening to reveal the child’s behavior to family members or friends,” the report reads. “Contempt and humiliation, making the child feel ridiculous in its always vulnerable relationship with adults, increase victims’ feelings of loneliness and abandonment.”

The commission said victims’ testimonies “bear witness to an emotional atmosphere of terror and to abusers’ regarding their crimes as mere instances of ‘the banality of evil.'”

Many victims said that they and their families considered themselves religious. Because the abuse they experienced was at the hands of church members, the victims reported that they developed a “basic mistrust” that persists to this day. That mistrust has also inspired feelings of protectiveness of their children and grandchildren, according to the report.

“The larger group among these revealed that they cut contact with the Church and partly or entirely ceased to be practicing, although they remain Catholic and express their faith by other means,” the report reads.

“The study shows that the Church lost faithfulness groups as a direct result of child sexual abuse perpetrated by its members. This effect extends to others who, while not having been abused themselves, are in sympathy with the suffering of the victims.”

A second group of victims, the report explains, who said they were able to make a distinction between abusers and the institution itself who remained practicing Catholics. A third group of victims was categorized as those who “cut off all faith and belief and became agnostic or atheist.”

The commission made recommendations, including ongoing training and supervision of church members, ceasing religious practices in closed locations, and providing psychological help for the victims.

The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests welcomed the report but found it “disturbing” that it didn’t name a single abuser.

“[W]e do believe there is a public interest in the identities of the alleged abusers and the places the abuses allegedly happened,” a statement from SNAP reads.

“The panel is to send to bishops by the end of the month a list of alleged abusers who are still active in the church. This is a good step in theory, but church officials clearly do the bare minimum when it comes to protecting children.”

The commission admits there is fear that abusers still active in the church may “continue to commit the same crimes.”

“[A] list was prepared on the basis of the data collected. Names were submitted to the Public Prosecutor as the work progressed, and a complete list of the names was provided to it on completion,” the report states.

The report comes as previous investigation reports have highlighted sexual abuse problems within Catholic churches in other countries.

In October 2021, an independent commission launched in 2018 found as many as 3,200 pedophiles had worked in the French Catholic Church since the 1950s.

A grand jury report released in 2018 detailed how 301 priests abused more than 1,000 children over the past several decadesinsix dioceses across Pennsylvania.

Pope Francis issued an apostolic letter in 2019 requiring clergy to report abuse, changing an earlier standard that allowed church officials their own discretion on the matter.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The Pope’s African pilgrimage

— Does the continent represent the future of Catholicism?

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As milestones go, the recent sight of three leading men of God together in Africa was quite something — a rare chance for Christian leaders to spread the word and challenge rivals for hearts and minds.

Pope Francis and the Vatican media machine might have led the way, but alongside him went Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, Iain Greenshields. They shared the Papal plane on the way home with the kind of bonhomie and mutual understanding that highlights the importance of Africa in the contest to be the world’s leading faith.

There they were, the three of them, in the war zone of South Sudan, the Christian stronghold that broke away from the Muslim north amid terrible conflict. Today that newest of countries represents a small but symbolically important piece of the continent’s religious jigsaw that will see Christianity grow by more than 40 per cent, the hierarchy believes, by 2050, and so ensure their faith will continue to stay just ahead of Islam in global per centages.

Some walked for days just to see and hear him

Ahead of that historic appearance of a Christian triumvirate, Pope Francis had spent days in Congo, sub-Saharan Africa’s largest country, home to more than 100 million, half of them Catholic, and the crucible of a conflict that has claimed more than five million lives, displacing millions more. It was a grim sign of the continuing murder and mayhem that the Pope had to cancel a trip to Eastern Congo, the epicentre of the war, because of fighting near the regional capital of Goma.

At his main mass in the capital, Kinshasa, more than a million Catholics joined him, some having walked for days just to see and hear him. Everywhere he went, thousands lined the streets and overpasses to glimpse the man many Congolese call simply “Our Father.” Francis, deeply moved, found the voice that has eluded him in recent times.

“This country, so immense and full of life, this diaphragm of Africa, struck by such violence like a blow to the stomach, has seemed for some time to be gasping for breath,” he told followers, clearly energised by the sight of so many worshippers. “But you are a diamond, believe in yourselves, and your future.”

The numbers do tell. According to the Vatican’s news agency, Africa accounts for 265 million members of the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics — 20 per cent, and growing fast. The Anglican church is smaller but with significant followers in those countries with a footprint of the British empire: Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa (think the late Desmond Tutu)

“Africa offers Christianity such opportunity, born out of tragedy and suffering maybe, but such potential,” to quote one of the Pope’s advisers, noting that the Pontiff insisted on making the trip despite poor health of late and being now wheelchair-bound. “Francis, better than anyone, knows where we have lost ground, and where we need to work.”

It is ironic to consider it but, yes, the Argentinian Pope does indeed know where Catholicism has seen the faithful flee elsewhere. In Latin America, once the vanguard of his own Jesuit mission and home to the largest Catholic country on the planet, Brazil, Church leaders acknowledge that tens of millions have been lost to rivals, especially the Evangelical and Pentecostal faiths.

Even in the Pope’s beloved Argentina, you can see the exodus and not just in the major cities, Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Rosario. In the foothills of the Andes, in conservative, rural Mendoza, the Catholic church is often half-empty. In contrast the Evangelical arena, often a large, multi-purpose room on the main street, or a schoolroom not used on the weekends, can be packed to overflowing — with the devout outside in sizable numbers.

“Ours is Christianity that speaks to people’s needs, and people’s lives,” says Evangelical minister Jose Hernandez in Mendoza, pinpointing how Rome’s hard line on “social issues” (code for contraception, abortion, and the role of women in the Church) especially during the long years of the Polish Pope, John Paul the Second, opened the floodgates. “Ordinary people have flocked to us.”

The religious battle for Africa has been joined

Fascinatingly, the attempts of Pope Francis to soften the conservative line of his predecessors — taking for example such a relaxed view of homosexuality (“who am I to judge?” he says, “they are children of God too”) — has produced blowback, the likes of which Christianity may not have seen before. Such appeasement seems to have come too late for his Church in Latin America — and in Africa, his open voice on gay life is the seed of clear dispute between his Vatican and some fiercely traditional Bishops, let alone communities, on the ground in the likes of Congo and South Sudan.

“The Pope can have his view on homosexuality, and we have ours,” said one Catholic Bishop in attendance as the Pope celebrated that mega-mass in Kinshasa. “It is a sin.” Justin Welby and the Anglican church heard likewise in South Sudan from their flock. “Better to have two wives than to be gay or lesbian,” according to one Protestant Archbishop there.

The religious battle for Africa has been joined, and Christianity, losing out elsewhere in the Global South, sees the continent as the go-to arena tomorrow. So much so that inside the Vatican — where I was once a young correspondent back in the day when they dared to elect a Pole as Pope — they say the next Pontiff could well be an African.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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More than 100 priests suspected of abuse remain active in Portugal’s Catholic Church

People walk by a church on the day Portugal’s commission investigating allegations of historical child sexual abuse by members of the Portuguese Catholic church will unveil its report, in Lisbon, Portugal, February 13, 2023.

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More than 100 priests suspected of child sexual abuse remain active in church roles in Portugal, according to the head of a commission investigating the issue.

The commission, which started its work in January 2022, said in its final report published on Monday that at least 4,815 children were sexually abused by members of the Roman Catholic Church in Portugal – mostly priests – over 70 years.

It added that the findings were the “tip of the iceberg”, describing the 4,815 cases as the “absolute minimum” number of victims.

“There is an approximate (number of accused priests) and it will clearly be more than 100,” child psychiatrist Pedro Strecht, who headed the commission, told SIC television.

The commission said it was preparing a list of accused priests still working to send to the Church and to the public prosecutors’ office.

Strecht said those on the list should be removed from their roles or at least should be banned from interacting with children and teenagers during the investigation.

Jose Ornelas, head of the Bishops’ Conference, said the institution was yet to receive the list.

“What Pope (Francis) says (is)… abusers of minors cannot hold positions within the ministry as long as it is proven that the person is an abuser,” Ornelas said, adding the Church would not conduct a “witch hunt” against its members.

Strecht said the Church had the “moral and ethical duty to collaborate with judicial authorities” on the matter.

Portuguese Prime Minister Antonio Costa said the revelations “shocked society as a whole”, adding that government officials, including the justice minister, would meet with commission members.

President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, who came under fire in October for saying 400 cases of alleged sexual abuse by clergy members did not seem to be “particularly high”, said the Church must be held accountable.

Portuguese bishops will meet on March 3 to consider implementing “more efficient and appropriate mechanisms” to prevent future abuses, Ornelas said.

In a statement, U.S.-based support group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP) called on Portuguese church officials to “prominently publish the name, photo, place of residence, and work history of abusive clergy”.

“Immediate action is needed, and it includes the dismissal of any bishop, chancellor, vicar general, or other church hierarchs who is complicit in what has happened,” SNAP said. “Without change at the top, nothing will change.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Hey Church! Stop Denying People Romance!

— What if someone told you that you were unworthy of romantic love, but instead, God and the Church could provide all the love you need? You’d probably say that was ridiculous. Yet, there are at least four groups of people to whom the church is saying exactly that. For Singles Awareness Day, I want to focus on these groups, upon whom many in the Church want to impose singleness.

By Greg Smith

1. LGBTQ Folks

The first group are LGBTQ folks. Recently, the pope said that it’s not a crime to be gay, but gay sex is still a sin. Many Catholic and Protestant conservatives share this view. Some have finally come around to understanding that it’s not a choice to be gay. They have quit condemning people for having gay thoughts. But “doing the gay thing,” they say, is something else. So, they say you can be a Christian and be gay, but you can’t be a Christian and do gay.

A couple of years ago, a local church offered a discussion about how to love LGBTQ people. I was encouraged that they were even having the conversation, so I attended. Unfortunately, they came to the conclusion that I described above. Still, they wanted to be compassionate. They recognized the fact that human beings are made for love. So, since they believed that LGBTQ folks were created for celibacy, they said that God and the Church could provide all the love that they needed.

They encouraged the Church to offer fellowship groups for LGBTQ individuals. Straight families should invite gay friends to their homes for supper. In other words, the Church should fill in the gap. Christians should make up for the loss that a gay Christian would feel without ever being able to have sex, or a spouse, or children of their own.

Of course, church leaders realized that inviting gay people to fellowship groups to cure their loneliness is like bandaging a wound that the Church gave them. So they justified their statement by saying the Church already has other groups of people who are expected to live a life of celibacy. They insisted that the Church wasn’t asking gay folks to do anything that they weren’t asking of other groups.

2. Unmarried People

The second group is unmarried people. The pastor said, “For me, the only legitimate sexual partner is my wife. Before I was married, God expected me to be celibate. So that’s pretty much the same thing as asking gay folks to be celibate.” Except it isn’t.

The difference is that the Church says that people can (some say “should”) choose to marry. Thus, they can have a blessed and sanctioned sexual partner in their spouse. But congregations and denominations that refuse LGBTQ folks the right to marry deny them romantic and sexual expression for a lifetime.

Perhaps the Church should rethink its ban on premarital sex. This argument has been made by some. It’s not my purpose in this article to weigh in on that. But forbidding premarital sex isn’t the same as denying LGBTQ folks the right to romantic and sexual fulfillment. The first position says, “Not now, not yet.” The second says, “Not ever.”

3. Catholic Clergy

The third group is the Catholic clergy. Roman Catholic priests, monks, and nuns are asked to take a vow to abstain from all acts of sexuality. If priests can do it, Church leaders said, then LGBTQ people can do it too. There are two problems with that.

The first problem is that the church should never ask clergy to take a vow of celibacy, either. God created human beings with a sex drive. It isn’t natural to deny that sex drive your whole life. Denying people the right to sexual expression and romantic love does not make them more holy. It usually turns them into greater sinners.

Since Catholic clergy members are denied the right to marry, they are only left with the alternative of finding illicit outlets for their sexuality. Sex is a biological function that was not meant to be repressed. We have seen the results of clergy who are denied legitimate sexual and romantic relationships. They don’t suddenly become asexual. Instead, they simply get good at hiding their behavior.

The second problem is that Catholic clergy take their vow of celibacy voluntarily. When they enter the priesthood, monastery, or convent, they know what they’re signing up for. Nobody tells them that they are unworthy of sexual love. Nobody tells them that they are a different breed of person who was not created for procreation. Those who take a vow of celibacy realize that they have a right to find love, to marry, to start a family of their own. They simply choose a different path from that of sexuality, romantic love, and family.

But, when the church tells LGBTQ folks that they have to take a vow of celibacy, it’s not the same thing. Conservative churches deny LGBTQ folks their right to romantic happiness. In the case of clergy who take a vow of celibacy, they do that of their own free will. But the church imposes celibacy on gay people. To say, “Roman Catholic clergy takes vows of celibacy, so gay folks should be celibate too” is a false equivalency. One is voluntary—the other is not.

4. Divorcees

Many conservative churches still maintain that divorcees are not allowed to remarry unless their ex-spouse dies and that anyone who marries a divorced person commits adultery. (This is why some say King Charles’ coronation should be invalidated—because Charles and Diana divorced, and because Camilla’s ex-husband Andrew is still alive.) Most moderate to liberal Christians interpret Jesus’ stance on divorce loosely. But many conservative churches dictate that their members cannot remarry once they divorce.

Here’s the problem with a literal interpretation and enforcement of this: it makes divorce an unforgivable sin. Jesus talked about only one unforgivable sin—and this isn’t it. Yet, conservative churches stigmatize divorcees. They not only forbid divorcees from remarriage but sometimes from serving in ministry. Yet, if we believe that God is in the business of second chances, we should recognize that God can bless subsequent marriages. If we understand that God made us for romantic and sexual fulfillment, we should encourage people to find happiness and hope for their future.

We don’t tend to focus that much on divorce as a sin these days. If we did, we’d have to recognize our hypocrisy. If churches are going to be hard-nosed about forbidding gay marriage, then they should enforce this rule about divorcees. However, if they want to excuse divorcees and grant them the ability to remarry, then they need to recognize gay marriage as well. You can’t have it both ways. Instead of saying, “It’s okay for us to deny sex to gays because we deny it to divorcees as well,” we ought to relax about both.

A Cross to Bear?

So, we have four large groups of people to whom the church has denied the right to be sexual human beings: LGBTQ folks, unmarried people, Roman Catholic clergy, and divorcees. For unmarried people, this prohibition is temporary, as long as they marry eventually. For Catholic clergy, at least it’s a choice. For divorcees, churches are becoming more liberal. But for LGBTQ folks, the conservative Church denies them any choice. Conservative leaders insist that God gave LGBTQ people a sex drive just to make them deny it. “It’s their cross to bear,” these leaders say, grateful that they themselves don’t have to carry that load.

Celibacy isn’t what Jesus meant when he said that we should take up our cross, deny ourselves, and follow him. If this were so, then the church would ask everyone to be celibate. Sexuality and the need for romantic love are intrinsic to humanity. Certainly, there are some who identify as asexual—for these people, celibacy is consistent with who they are at their core. But for the majority of the planet—people with sex drives and a desire for romantic intimacy—the Church has no right to ban fulfillment to an entire group of people. What if the Church allowed us all to be faithful to who we are at our core?

Hey Church! Stop Denying People Romance!

Too often, the church tells people, “Don’t worry about love. Give yourself to faith, and love will find you.” As a trite saying, it sounds sweet. As a way of helping people not to perseverate on finding the right partner prematurely, it kind of makes sense. The right person will come at the right time, so to speak. But, in honor of Singleness Awareness Day (February 15), I have to say that if a person wants to stay single, that’s okay, too. While singleness may be a calling for some people, it isn’t something the Church has a right to impose on anyone. But as a way of denying people’s right to romance and sexuality, phrases like this are a crime against basic humanity. Only when the Church recognizes the rights to sexuality and romantic love for all types of people can we embrace the fullness of who God meant us to be.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Irish delegates call for radical change at European assembly of Catholic churches

— Representatives push for women to be admitted to priesthood after island-wide consultations

The assembly in Prague has been attended in person by four Irish delegates with 10 attending online.

By Patsy McGarry

An assembly of the Catholic Church in Europe has been told that members in Ireland want women to be admitted to the diaconate and priesthood. In island-wide consultations “many women communicated their pain at being denied their agency in the life of the church and spoke of feelings of exclusion and discrimination. Women play a critical role in the life of the church but so many men and women have spoken of the church ‘excluding’ the fullness of the gifts of women,” representatives of the Irish church said.

In Ireland there was “a deep longing for a more inclusive and welcoming church. People wish for this enlarged tent to be experienced in liturgy, language, structures, practices and decision-making. The co-responsibility of all the baptised must therefore be recognised and practised, to overcome clericalism and to ensure full and equal participation of women in all aspects of church life and ministry and decision-making,” they said.

The European assembly in Prague, which is ongoing, has been attended in person by four Irish delegates with a further 10 attending online. Those in Prague include Catholic Primate Archbishop Eamon Martin, Dr Nicola Brady, Julieann Moran and Fr Eamonn Fitzgibbon. The 10 online delegates involve six woman, including Ursula Halligan of the We Are Church Ireland group. Representatives of 39 Catholic churches across Europe are in attendance.

Speaking to the assembly on behalf of the Irish church, Ms Moran and Fr Fitzgibbon said that in the consultations with practicing Catholics around Ireland “those who are in loving relationships that don’t accord with church teaching, including people identifying as LGBTQI+, and those in second unions, also spoke of their hurt, particularly around harmful and offensive language used in church circles and documents”.

There was also “a call for greater inclusion of migrants and refugees; of people living with disabilities; of young people; of single parents. Some of those who love the pre-Vatican II liturgy also spoke of their sense of exclusion.”

Overwhelmingly, however, they spoke of the destruction caused to the Catholic Church in Ireland by clerical child sexual abuse. It had “a profound effect on the church in Ireland”, they said. Having listened to abuse survivors during the consultation process “we recognise that abuse is an open wound and will remain a barrier to communion, participation and mission until it is comprehensively addressed”, they said.

There was “an anger, a sadness, a sense of loss, including in some cases a loss of faith, which is felt most acutely by those who were abused, but it is also felt by the lay faithful, by priests, bishops, religious men and women, by those who have remained, and by those who left because they no longer hear the good news in a church that failed so many”, they said.

“Carefully chosen words spoken with humility and sincerity help, but they are not enough. We need to continue our efforts to provide times and spaces for lamentation, to grieve this shared pain and loss.”

They also spoke of how “across both political jurisdictions on the island of Ireland, the last number of decades have seen divisive conflict including suspicion and sectarianism within the Christian family, together with a radical demographic, economic and social transformation”.

This European assembly is one of seven continental assemblies taking place across five continents in the latest stage of an ongoing “synodal process” in the Catholic Church worldwide, leading to two planned Synods of Bishops in Rome, one next October and a second in October 2024.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!