Coming out can be challenging for young people across the globe – but in Italy many young Catholics are struggling with negative attitudes from both their communities and their churches.
While some churches offer support for the LGBT community, others are still asking young people to see a psychologist or stop attending Church events. Sometimes even celibacy is expected.
Giulia is in the committee for an informal LGBT Catholic association that supports people up and down the country. Listen to her chat with her friend and fellow group member Edoardo about the challenges they’ve faced.
You can find out more about issues concerning young people and the Catholic Church by listening to the World Service’s Heart and Soul programme here.
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, speaks in Baltimore on Nov. 12.
IT IS EVIDENT that the Catholic Church is incapable on its own of exorcising the scourge of clergy sex abuse. The scandal raged unchecked for decades and, even after it was exposed in 2002 by the Boston Globe , has been met by the church hierarchy with denial, temporizing, stone walling and half-measures.
Even as the bishops of America’s 196 Catholic dioceses and archdioceses gathered in Baltimore Monday to grapple with the latest major revelations — a Pennsylvania grand jury’s report from August detailing decades of abuse involving more than 1,000 victims and at least 300 priests — they were stopped in their tracks by an abrupt message from the Vatican, which asked them to hold off. That intercession arrived along with a warning from Pope Francis’s ambassador in the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, who seemed to scoff at the proposal, which the bishops had been set to vote on, to establish a lay commission that would assess bishops’ misconduct — “as if we were no longer capable of reforming or trusting ourselves,” as he put it.
That remark crystallized the arrogance that has often characterized the church’s stance even as countless exposés have laid bare the culpability of its leaders. From high and low, the church has broadcast its conviction that its own transgressions are no worse than that of other institutions; that state statutes of limitations that shield dioceses from lawsuits should be preserved; that no foothold may be allowed for mechanisms to discipline bishops who have enabled abuse by transferring pedophile priests from parish to parish.
Voices of moral clarity have been heard from within the church, urging genuine change. “Brother bishops, to exempt ourselves from this high standard of accountability is unacceptable and cannot stand,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said in a speech to the gathered bishops Monday following that of Mr. Pierre. “Whether we will be regarded as guardians of the abused or the abuser will be determined by our actions.”
Yet, more often than not, those voices have been ignored.
The pontiff has summoned bishops from around the world to the Vatican for a meeting to address the scandal in February; this summit, we are urged to believe, will once and for all set the church on a path toward surmounting the blight of abuse. The fact of that pending event was the proffered pretext for the church’s request that the U.S. bishops put off two items on their agenda this week in Baltimore: establishing the lay commission to review complaints against bishops, and adopting a code of conduct for themselves — the first such codified ethical guidelines.
The agenda was modest, and Rome’s intervention is telling. Again and again, the Vatican pays lip service to the suffering of victims. Again and again, it undercuts its own assertions of contrition.
James Grein, who says he was sexually abused for years by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, stands with Church Militant leader Michael Voris at the group’s rally outside the bishops’ conference on Nov. 13, 2018 in Baltimore
For nearly two decades, to be an advocate for survivors of Catholic clergy sex abuse was often to be a lonely protester, frequently ignored or sometimes even maligned as disrespectful by some Catholics and clergy.
That has changed dramatically since June, when clergy abuse scandals surfaced again in the U.S. church. Enormous energy has been pumped into the movement, with parishes around the country holding crowded listening sessions on the topic, bishops making abuse the focus of their annual fall meeting this week and legislators finding new support for measures to expand statutes of limitation for child sexual abuse.
But the victims’ advocacy movement is also being transformed by bitter ideological divides among Catholics. That chasm was dramatically on display this week at the semi-annual meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.
Monday’s two public events were dominated by the older groups — research site BishopAccountability and SNAP — whose leaders focus on oversight and justice and participate less in the controversial debates over the perceived roles of celibacy and homosexuality in the crisis. A dozen or so people attended each of those events, and around 20 came Tuesday to stand with survivors who raised signs with words including “truth” and “reform.”
A few hours later, the right-wing advocacy group and news site Church Militant hosted more than 300 protesters under a pavilion for a revival-like rally. The profile of the group, whose leaders and web site blame abuse scandals on homosexual priests and a general falling away from orthodoxy, got a boost Tuesday as James Grein, one of two people who this summer accused ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of child sexual abuse, appeared for the first time in public at the rally.
The crowd roared as Grein singled out a pope who some on the right wing see as heretical and politically too liberal.
“Jesus’ law is much higher than pontifical secrets. It’s not Francis’ church, it’s Jesus Christ’s church,” said Grein, who says McCarrick abused him for nearly two decades, starting when he was a boy. McCarrick’s suspension in June launched the current scandal in the church.
While mainstream survivors groups declined to team up with Church Militant in Baltimore, its hefty social media audience — 200,000 Facebook followers — adopted the abuse scandals as a cause this summer.
The older survivors’ groups have shied away from Church Militant in part because it does not routinely cover female victims of clergy sex abuse or go after conservative bishops who have allegedly abused. These groups want to keep the focus on goals like identifying abusers and creating policies and practices that require transparency and help victims.
“I feel like they’re using victims for a political agenda and I’m concerned about that. They’re using this to kind of get to where they want to be,” SNAP’s regional director, Becky Ianni, said of Church Militant. “And I hate when someone uses victims. Victims aren’t conservative or liberal. We’re victims. And that’s what people need to focus on.”
At the same time, Church Militant represents a large new audience for some longtime advocates who want to keep attention on abuse— even as its approach presents land mines for long-established groups.
Referring to Church Militant and other far-right websites like Breitbart and LifeSite that have taken up aspects of the cause, BishopAccountability co-director Anne Barrett Doyle said, “I see they perform a service to some extent in that they expose predatory bishops and predatory priests that mainstream press aren’t yet covering. But at the same time, because they have a different goal, their goal isn’t simple justice and accountability and transparency — there is a bias.”
Asked for comment on the role of Church Militant, the bishops’ conference issued a statement saying the umbrella group “supports everyone’s right to a peaceful protest.”
Until this summer, posts on the Church Militant site were primarily focused on aggressively fighting advancements toward gay equality in the church, as well as some conservative secular politics. A typical headline is: “The Depth of My Anger Over Decades of Effete Priests.”
Michael Voris, a former television reporter who founded Church Militant in 2012, said the McCarrick case shifted his group’s focus.
Voris in 2016 released a video saying that for much of his 30s, he had multiple sexual relationships with men, including those with whom he lived. He portrayed himself as a victim of the devil.
Voris said the McCarrick scandal — in which many top clergy in Rome and in the United States are alleged to have known of at least rumors that McCarrick was harassing male seminarians — merges with his followers’ belief that a cabal of gay top clergy is at the core of church division.
“Since McCarrick, there is a lot more anger from faithful Catholics who feel like they’ve been duped. They feel like they’ve been lied to by the establishment,” he told the Post.
It was hard for conservative Catholics to go after the establishment, Voris said, but “not anymore.”
There was the feeling, he said: “’Well, they’re the successors of the apostle. We have to look at things in a charitable way,’” he said. “But the fact that McCarrick was the one who ran the show, and he was covered up for — that was the last straw.”
This isn’t the first time the survivors’ movement has seen disagreement, said some long-term watchers. The key division decades ago, in the 1990s and early 2000s, they said, was more about tactics. Some groups like the Linkup, now faded, were focused on healing and care for survivors, while SNAP was more about confronting the church and publicizing crimes.
It’s also not the first time the ultraconservative wing of the church was focused on the topic of abuse. Terry McKiernan, Barrett-Doyle’s partner at BishopAccountability, said some of the most aggressive reporting on the issue in the 1980s and early 1990s was by the Wanderer, a 151-year-old Catholic newspaper whose motto is “No one can be at the same time a sincere Catholic and a true Socialist.” Some of the earliest reporting on rumors of McCarrick’s behavior with seminarians in the early 2000s appeared on conservative blogs.
McKiernan said liberals and conservatives tend to focus on abusers who fall in their opposing ideological camps but that he feels it has been — until now — harder for orthodox Catholics to display leadership on the issue.
“Conservative Catholics didn’t want any activism that seemed to be counter to the power structures of the church, which they respected and felt had doctrinal valiance,” McKiernan said. “McCarrick gave them permission to be aggressive but still be thinking with the mind of the church.”
Some survivors and leaders at events in Baltimore said they see in 2018 a far greater level of interest in the topic of abuse among the typical churchgoing Catholic.
“What I’m seeing for the first time is we have Catholics joining us in droves. I have Catholic groups saying: ‘What can we do for survivors?’ ” Ianni said. While there was huge publicity in the early 2000s around the Boston crisis, the interest seemed to come and then go, as faithful Catholics believed the leadership that the problem was all cleaned up.
Then came Chile. And Ireland. And the grand jury reports in Pennsylvania And Buffalo. And McCarrick. And more than a dozen state investigations into clergy sex abuse.
Ianni said lay Catholics may be “realizing they are the church. Maybe for the first time, they’re finding their voices.”
Shaun Dougherty, a survivor originally from Johnstown, Pa., stood Monday with a sign outside the Baltimore Marriott. He said he believes it is now more comfortable for victims and advocates who speak out, but that’s not enough.
“We see so many tragedies today — Parkland, Las Vegas,” he said, citing recent mass shootings. “And people poured into the streets and marched for reforms. In Pennsylvania, we had wall-to-wall media coverage [of the grand jury report], and we couldn’t even pack the [state] Capitol for reforms. The fact that parishioner support is not there is very hard to take.”
Dougherty said the focus on celibacy or homosexuality as the solution is a distractions to the movement. “The Roman Catholic bishops have a serious problem with child molestation, and they are conferencing here to figure out how to get away with it,” he said. “A lot of this other stuff bogs it down.”
An alleged clergy sex-abuse coverup case unfolding this week at one of the Washington region’s most prominent Latino parishes is putting a spotlight on a segment of the Catholic Church seen as uniquely opaque when it comes to misconduct: religious orders.
Three parish leaders at the Shrine of the Sacred Heart, a bustling, heavily Salvadoran church in Columbia Heights, were removed this week following reports that three teenage girls were groped or kissed by the Rev. Urbano Vazquez, a gregarious and popular priest.
The arrest and child sex-abuse charge against Vazquez and removal of the lead priest and the chief child-protection coordinator have stunned Sacred Heart parishioners, with many circling the church protectively or taking a wait-and-see attitude toward the charges. Sacred Heart is large and central to the area’s Hispanic community, with many ministries — a school, English literacy classes and an immigration resource center, among other services.
“Maybe it wouldn’t have had such an impact if it had been in a different church,” Carlos Enrique, 53, a longtime parishioner, said Thursday evening. Parish leaders informed the congregation of the scandal via an email Wednesday, describing it as “upsetting news.”
“I don’t go for the priests, I go for Christ. … Whatever happens, I won’t leave,” Enrique said.
Vazquez, an assistant priest, and the Rev. Moises Villalta, the parish’s lead priest, are Capuchins, an order, or religious community, within the Catholic Church. The Capuchins staff Sacred Heart, which is owned and operated by the Archdiocese of Washington. While the archdiocese can remove the order’s priests from its own institutions if problems come to its attention, it does not otherwise manage them or participate in disciplinary action.
Questions linger as to whether the Capuchins’ independent leadership of the church played a role in the parish’s mishandling of the allegations against Vazquez. (Vazquez could not be reached, and his public defender declined comment. Villalta also could not be reached for comment.)
The email the parish sent to congregants said Villalta and Sonia Marlene Aquino, the child-protection coordinator, “did not follow the correct reporting protocol.” A police report Thursday said parents of at least two of the three girls had reported the abuse to parish leadership as early as 2015, but it had not been reported to civil authorities or the archdiocese until late last month. It is unclear why the allegations resurfaced.
Advocates for survivors and experts on church governance said lack of transparency is a major problem with religious orders, all of which are run separately and independently from dioceses and archdioceses.
Victims groups wrote just this week to Callista Gingrich, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, urging her to press U.S. bishops on various abuse topics, including the lack of transparency of religious orders, such as the Capuchins, Jesuits, Dominicans and Crosiers.
And on Oct. 26, amid the mounting national pressure on the church around transparency, the major umbrella group for male orders — the Conference of Major Superiors of Men — wrote to its dozens of member groups to encourage them to release the names of priests who have faced credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors and to alert local bishops where accused men have lived.
Peter Isley, a survivor of abuse by a Capuchin who is now a spokesman for the global group Ending Clergy Abuse, said his group and other survivor groups wrote to Gingrich as part of a long-term effort to bring more accountability to the orders.
Isley said leaders of religious orders disagree about whether they are required to follow the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, the key document passed by the U.S. bishops in 2002 that governs bishops’ procedures around abuse. The charter requires, among other things, dioceses to report allegations of abuse and to file reports on a variety of preventive measures.
“Some say yes; some say no,” Isley said. He and other abuse-prevention advocates said orders permanently remove from ministry, or laicize, accused priests much less frequently than dioceses. Orders are also organized into regional provinces that span states and sometimes national borders, while dioceses (and archdioceses) are within U.S. states, which can make it harder for civil officials to keep track of accused individuals.
Of about 48,500 priests nationwide, about 31 percent are from religious orders, and the other 69 percent are from dioceses, according to the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, a research center about church life, at Georgetown University.
The fact that Sacred Heart was run by a religious order hasn’t been raised formally as an issue by parishioners or anyone in the archdiocese. However the case is the first new claim of abuse within an archdiocesan parish in almost 20 years, and the D.C. archdiocese has been at the center of an explosion of concern about clergy child abuse since the suspension in June of former Washington archbishop Theodore McCarrick, an accused abuser who has since resigned from the College of Cardinals, and the stepping down last month of his successor, Cardinal Donald Wuerl, over allegations that he mishandled abuse complaints while he was bishop in Pittsburgh. To have a new allegation of abuse and coverup is a blow to an archdiocese trying to shore up its reputation.
The Rev. Tom Betz, provincial — or regional leader — for Vazquez’s region, said in a statement Friday night that Capuchins receive regular training to prevent abuse and are accredited by Praesidium, an independent firm that consults and assesses abuse-prevention programs.
“Obviously our procedures for the protection of minors failed and we must now redouble our efforts to train our friars and improve our procedures,” Betz said in a statement.
The archdiocese, when asked about the oversight of the order-staffed parish, said Sacred Heart “receives the same, full support and engagement as the other parishes of the archdiocese,” spokeswoman Chieko Noguchi wrote in an email. But while the archdiocese had the power to remove the priests from the parish itself, she wrote, “beyond that, regarding discipline for the Capuchins, that’s a question to ask the religious order.”
The removal of the two men appears to cut in half the full-time clerical staff at Sacred Heart. The archdiocese will send staff to the parish Sunday and offer resources to the families of the survivors. The parish planned a prayer vigil Friday in response to the arrest.
Parishioners said they were stunned at the scandal unfolding at the church.
The parish’s priests are “the pillars of the parish … the voice of the community, the face of the community,” Gilber Canales said Thursday night outside Mass. They are vocal advocates on immigration issues, both in their homilies and in attending community marches and rallies protesting the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
Canales, 38, who has been a member of the church for 22 years, was married in the church, and his daughter was baptized there. He teaches Catechism classes to children and lives nearby. “It’s like a bucket of cold water,” he said. “It’s chilling. … We didn’t know anything.”
He was used to hearing about the ongoing sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church worldwide, but he never thought it would hit his own community. “It’s like we’re in the eye of the hurricane.”
Some said the reports could have been made as a result a series of listening sessions held in the archdiocese this summer and fall about the crisis.
Katlyn Toelle said the community has prayed for victims of sexual abuse at Mass every week since an explosive grand jury report came out of Pennsylvania this summer. They pray “for those survivors of abuse, whether by power or violence, especially by the clergy who have not lived up to their call to holiness,” Toelle said in an email. Toelle, who coordinates music for the English-speaking Mass, said Sacred Heart is a warm and welcoming parish that openly discusses difficult issues and tries to fight injustice.
“We have been harmed and we have been deceived, but we will not be defined by it,” Toelle said.
At Mass on Thursday night, a new priest read in Spanish from the day’s Gospel, about the Parable of the Lost Sheep. He didn’t mention the scandal.
“With human weakness, we can fail … we can become dirty with sin. … But Jesus Christ is looking for each of us. Why? To heal us,” the priest said later during the homily.
Many parishioners voiced a desire to protect the parish and declined to comment on the abuse allegations.
Outside, Marco Antonio, 50, a parishioner for 13 years, questioned the intentions and credibility of the accusations, claiming the families “want to take advantage of the situation.”
“The truth is, here the Hispanic community is very friendly,” he said, saying that kissing and hugging are common forms of affection.
But Canelas didn’t dismiss the allegations outright. He placed the blame on Villalta for not reporting the allegations sooner. “If this happened, why did they wait?”
Vazquez had been at the parish since 2014. He was born in 1972 in Mexico, and made his first vows to the Capuchins in 2003. He studied in Washington while living in a Capuchin community, and recieved a Masters of Divinity from the Centro de Estudios de los Dominicos de Caribe in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
He was ordained as a deacon in Puerto Rico in 2013 and served as a deacon-intern for a year at Our Lady of the Mountains Parish in Cumberland, Md., before going to Sacred Heart.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore said there were no complaints to the archdiocese about Vazquez during the year at Our Lady, and Noguchi said there were no allegations against Vazquez made to the D.C. archdiocese until last month.
Religious order priests like Vazquez have “a completely different way of life” in terms of the willingness of the institution to remove or discipline them compared with dioceses, said Patrick Wall, a canon lawyer and former priest who became a researcher and watchdog against clergy abuse.
Of the handling of sex abuse by clergy within Catholic orders, Wall said, “This is a long-standing problem the bishops have never solved.”
Silenced Irish priest Father Tony Flannery has once again broken ranks with church authorities in Ireland by calling for an overhaul of the ancient seal of Confession.
On the eve of a speaking tour in the U.S., the outspoken Redemptorist cleric said he wants to see legislation introduced in Ireland which would require priests here to break the confessional seal if someone admits to child abuse.
At present, the Vatican’s rules surrounding confessional secrecy mean there are no legal obligations under canon law to report concerns or allegations of abuse of a minor.
But moves have already been made in Australia to ensure that allegations of clerical sexual abuse that are made in the sacrament are immediately reported to the authorities.
Following the country’s extensive Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, two states, South Australia and Australian Capital Territory, have begun fast-tracking mandatory legislation to compel practicing churchmen to break the seal of confession if someone admits to child abuse.
And now Flannery, who had previously supported the ancient ruling that a priest should never reveal what he hears in confession, said his opinions have changed and that he now thinks Ireland should follow the Australian lead.
The 71-year-old Co. Galway native, who was censured by the Vatican over six years ago for his liberal views, said, “The debate has been going on for some time about the seal of Confession in the Catholic Church. There have been calls to make it obligatory for priests if they are told in the sacrament that the penitent is sexually abusing a minor, they must inform the authorities.
“This is a difficult one since the seal of Confession – the requirement that a priest can never reveal what he hears in Confession — is one of the most serious obligations for any priest, and if that is compromised in any way, it undermines the sacrament as we have known it.
“Over recent years I have always argued that this cannot change, but now I am beginning to think differently. The situation within the church over clerical sexual abuse is so serious, and the church’s credibility so damaged, that I am not sure we can hold to this position anymore.”
Flannery, a founder of the Association of Catholic Priests, also called for individual confessions to be replaced by “general absolution,” which would involve a gathering of believers being granted absolution for their sins without prior individual Confession to a priest.
He added, “The reality is that very few people in Ireland go to Confession any more, but in the event of a person admitting child abuse, this needs to be reported. I also think other serious crimes need to be reported too, for example, what happens if someone tells a priest they have murdered their wife.
“If the seal of Confession is broken in any way, then Confession as we now know it will cease to exist. But I think the time has come for change, and general absolution would be a better way to celebrate the sacrament.”
Flannery is in the U.S. this week, where he is due to give talks in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. on church reform. He was suspended from public ministry in 2012 for his liberal views on women priests, homosexuality and contraception, and has since conceded that there is little hope of his censorship being lifted.
