William Lori, archbishop looks at Paul Jan Zdunek, chair of the Committee of Sex Abuse Survivors representing all victims in the Archdiocese of Baltimore’s bankruptcy case as they update the bankruptcy proceedings resulting from decades of child sex abuse within the Catholic church.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s bankruptcy case moved closer to the critical mediation phase Monday, as attorneys for the Catholic church, its insurance carriers and a committee of sex abuse survivors reached a tentative agreement on the terms for upcoming negotiations.
The agreement is tentative because the lawyers still need their clients’ approval for a last-minute detail hashed out in the hallways outside of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Baltimore: Whether the archdiocese will drop its breach-of-contract lawsuit against its insurers, and what the survivors’ role would be should they choose to refile it later.
Scheduled for a contested hearing Monday, attorneys in the case settled their differences in time to avoid debating legal issues in court. After being briefed on the tentative agreement, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michelle M. Harner credited the lawyers for “creating a mediation structure that’s acceptable to all.”
During mediation, attorneys and their clients get together with independent mediators to negotiate the amount of money the archdiocese and its insurers each have to contribute to settle survivor claims, as well as an eventual reorganization plan for the church featuring protocols designed to prevent the scourge of clergy sexual abuse from happening again.
The tentative agreement reached Monday would allow the archdiocese’s insurers to jointly nominate a third mediator, in addition to the two already proposed by the church and the survivors committee: Robert J. Faris, chief judge of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Hawaii, and attorney Brian J. Nash, an attorney who specializes in mediation.
Attorneys would be able to challenge the mediator proposed by the insurance companies.
Baltimore’s diocese, America’s oldest, declared bankruptcy Sept. 29, two days before Maryland’s Child Victims Act took effect. That law lifted previous time limits for people who were sexually abused as children to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled their torment.
Legislators passed the child victims law following the release of a state attorney general report which found that 156 clergy and other officials in the Baltimore diocese tormented more than 600 children and young adults, dating to the 1940s. The abuse spanned the diocese’s jurisdiction, which covers Baltimore and nine counties in Central and Western Maryland.
When the archdiocese declared bankruptcy, survivors who planned to sue the church had to repurpose their stories into claims in the bankruptcy proceeding. Harner set a May 31 deadline for survivors to file. That deadline came and went with hundreds of claims being filing in the case, though the exact number has not been disclosed publicly.
Baltimore Archbishop William Lori recently struck a unified tone with leader of the survivors committee, Paul Jan Zdunek, but tensions remained with the church’s insurance companies.
The church sued its insurers alleging breach of contract for failing to cover, or indicating they would not provide coverage for, claims of sexual abuse of minors. The survivors’ committee, which was also at loggerheads with the insurance companies, sought standing in that lawsuit. The insurers pushed back on the committee’s request at the same time it sought to argue the lawsuit, asking for the complaint to be moved from bankruptcy court to the U.S. District Court in Baltimore.
That lawsuit still was pending as of Monday, but the archdiocese tentatively agreed with insurers to dismiss the complaint. They reserved the right to file suit again and, if they do, the attorneys tentatively agreed that the survivors’ committee would have standing in that case. The details over the lawsuit were the one item attorneys had to consult their respective clients with.
Which of the archdiocese’s insurance policies were applicable to the sexual abuse at the time it occurred — and how much money those companies are on the hook for — will be subject to mediation. The church and survivors’ committee each hired expert insurance lawyers to examine the policies, which are numerous.
Edwin Caldie, an attorney for the survivors’ committee, said in court Monday that the tentative mediation agreement the church and committee struck with insurers was the subject of great “cooperation” and “candor,” adding that the dialogue “created more trust and a bit of hope for the mediation process.”
The Roman Catholic archbishop of New Orleans has said the allegations at the heart of a child-sex trafficking investigation being conducted by state police against his archdiocese are a “sin”, “evil” and a crime – but he has insisted he was oblivious to them when they unfolded during a bygone era earlier in his career.
Gregory Aymond’s comments, in an interview published on Sunday by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune newspaper, were his first about an investigation which erupted into public view in April as Louisiana state troopers served the archdiocese’s headquarters with a search warrant that accused the institution of potentially having run a child-sex trafficking ring responsible for “widespread sexual abuse of minors dating back decades”.
A sworn statement attached to the warrant added that the institution – which filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020 when faced with dozens of lawsuits stemming from the decades-old clerical molestation crisis engulfing the global church – also purportedly covered up the abuse and failed to report it to law enforcement.
The inquiry which Aymond addressed in Sunday’s interview started in part after attorneys representing clergy abuse claimants seeking damages from the archdiocese provided a 48-page memorandum asserting that there was evidence of many of the allegations cited in April’s warrant within internal documents that the church was compelled to produce during the bankruptcy.
That memo recounted how Aymond “worked, socialized and/or lived with at least 48” clergymen accused in bankruptcy claims alleging child sexual abuse, starting in 1973 – when he became a teacher at a New Orleans high school primarily catering to boys interested in the priesthood – through 2000, which was his 14th and final year as the rector-president of the city’s Notre Dame seminary.
The state police warrant alleged that investigators had spoken with victims who reported being brought to swim nude in the pool at the seminary – which trains priests – and get “sexually assaulted or abused … [while] members of the archdiocese were present”.
Yet Aymond told the Times-Picayune that he “never experienced any of those things”.
“Maybe I lived a naive life,” Aymond said to the newspaper. “I don’t think so. But they say these things happened and I would love to know where, when and by whom?”
Aymond made clear that he viewed the fallout of the clergy molestation scandal as a mess that he inherited from the three preceding New Orleans archbishops: Philip Hannan and Francis Schulte, who have died; and Alfred Hughes. He said the abuse that spurred the scandal “should have been reported”, and it was “wrong” for it to not be.
“But it was a sign of the times” when pedophilia was less understood, Aymond remarked to the Times-Picayune.
Aymond served various roles under Hannan and Schulte, including as a high-ranking aide known as a vicar general whose responsibilities would have included administering misconduct complaints against archdiocesan clergymen. He became the bishop of Austin, Texas, in 2000 and returned to New Orleans to succeed Hughes as archbishop in 2009.
Reportedly, while in his home gazing at a photograph of him, Hannan, Schulte and Hughes all standing together, Aymond told the Times-Picayune: “I don’t think any of those men … intentionally tried to hurt people.
“Did they knowingly or unknowingly make terrible mistakes? Yes, knowingly or unknowingly they made terrible mistakes that have cost the church reputation and financially.
“But I cannot judge their hearts.”
Despite Aymond conceding that his predecessors’ management of the clergy molestation scandal hurt people, his administration has left Hannan’s name on an archdiocesan-run high school. And Schulte’s name still graces an imposing building at Notre Dame seminary.
‘I know my legacy’
In other parts of the wide-ranging interview, which the Times-Picayune reported conducting over three days, Aymond for the first time pledged to make archdiocesan files detailing the local church’s clergy abuse scandal publicly accessible after resolving the bankruptcy. He also indicated his willingness to meet privately with small groups of abuse survivors to hear their stories.
And he said he’s frustrated that the focus on the child molestation scandal enveloping his archdiocese has overshadowed some of the good things he described the church having accomplished. He mentioned increased mass attendance, how 200 adults had recently been baptized and confirmed within the archdiocese, and growing youth ministries, among other things.
“I know my legacy will be ‘he dealt with sexual abuse,’ but I did more than that,” said Aymond, 74. “I have taken seriously the role of bishop, being a pastor and being a shepherd.”
As the Times-Picayune noted, Aymond’s interview with the outlet came more than five years after he released a November 2018 list disclosing the names of about 50 clergymen faced with substantial child molestation allegations while working locally. He meant the move to be a conciliatory gesture over the ongoing clergy abuse scandal.
But Aymond has drawn criticism as the list has since grown to about 80 names. And the number of priests, deacons, nuns, religious brothers and lay staffers named in abuse claims filed as part of the archdiocese’s bankruptcy is more than 300, the bulk of whom the church has not labeled as credibly accused.
At the time his archdiocese filed for bankruptcy, Aymond indicated his administration believed it could resolve the proceeding at a cost of about $7m, including compensation for abuse victims. Yet the unsettled bankruptcy had cost the church about $40m just in fees for legal and other professional services while abuse claimants still had not gotten a cent as of Sunday.
The archdiocese’s bankruptcy attorneys at one point were prepared to argue that most of the abuse claims were worth relatively little because they had been brought past filing deadlines known as statutes of limitation. But that strategy absorbed a blow when the Louisiana state supreme court in June upheld the constitutionality of laws temporarily allowing child molestation victims to pursue civil damages no matter how long ago their abuse was.
Furthermore, the archdiocese anticipated the documents spelling out its history of clergy abuse would remain under a court seal while the bankruptcy was unresolved. But they have repeatedly leaked into news media reports, showing how the church had gone to unusual lengths to suppress the truth about the abusive conduct of some of its priests and deacons – and to generously provide for them financially, including under Aymond.
Another source of unflattering headlines for the archdiocese: the pending prosecution of retired priest Lawrence Hecker, 92, who was criminally charged in September with raping a child in 1975 or 1976 at a church attached to the New Orleans high school dedicated to educating prospective priests.
Aymond was either in his third or fourth year on the school’s faculty at the time the purported rape occurred. And in 1976, the year after his ordination into the priesthood, Aymond assumed the title of “business manager” at the school, according to his archdiocesan personnel file.
That same year, as he has acknowledged, Aymond confiscated sexually suggestive, handwritten letters which another priest – Robert Cooper – sent two of the school’s students. The letters have since purportedly disappeared yet led to Cooper’s dismissal from the school.
Meanwhile, Hecker’s alleged victim maintained he reported his alleged rape to the principal of the school, Paul Calamari, who – along with Cooper – was later named in Aymond’s 2018 list as a credibly accused clergy predator.
Hecker appeared on the 2018 list, too. He had confessed in writing to his superiors in 1999 that he had molested several other children whom he had met through work – but the archdiocese let him minister for three more years before allowing him to quietly retire with lucrative benefits, some of which he still gets.
Aymond was carbon-copied on an archdiocesan letter welcoming Hecker back to work after his acknowledgment to abusing minors repeatedly. He was a high-ranking aide to the New Orleans archbishop at the time, Schulte.
The credibly accused list which Aymond released nine years into his tenure as Hughes’ successor was the archdiocese’s first public acknowledgment that Hecker retired in the wake of his admitted serial child molestation, according to investigative reporting conducted by the Guardian as well as the New Orleans CBS affiliate WWL Louisiana.
The former student pressing the criminal case against Hecker has told authorities that his school paid for him to receive mental therapy after the abuse – yet campus administrators never notified police about the crime. He finally took matters into his own hands and denounced Hecker to law enforcement in the summer of 2022.
‘Blind, incompetent or a liar’
The ensuing investigation not only resulted in criminal charges being filed against Hecker. It also spurred the child sex-trafficking investigation that Aymond commented on in his interview Sunday with the Times-Picayune.
Mere days before the interview’s publication, a priest ordained in Nigeria who Aymond invited to work in Texas and near New Orleans was charged in Florida with possessing child abuse imagery and sexually assaulting two women for whom he served as a spiritual adviser.
Church officials in Austin first suspended Anthony Odiong from ministering in that region in 2019. Their counterparts in New Orleans waited until this past December to do the same. That second suspension came two years after one of the women to speak out against Odiong had filed a clergy abuse claim in 2021 in Aymond’s archdiocese’s bankruptcy case.
Aymond on Sunday did not address Odiong’s arrest.
Lawyers who have the largest contingent of clergy abuse claimants in that bankruptcy issued a statement Sunday saying it beggared belief for Aymond to portray himself as having been unaware of the predatory and abusive behavior around him during his rise in the church.
“He is either deaf and blind, incompetent or a liar – and we know which one he is,” said the statement from Richard Trahant, Soren Gisleson and Johnny Denenea.
Aymond told the Times-Picayune that “it is simply not true” to call him a liar.
“I am a man of integrity,” he reportedly said, “and I do not lie.”
In September 2019, returning from a visit to Africa, Pope Francis reflected on the flight home to Rome on the tensions that were tearing at the unity of the church. “I pray that there will be no schism,” the pope told the Vatican press corps, “but I am not afraid.”
Since then, the threat of a formal split of dissident Catholics from the church or the creation of a separate sect has grown to be a major theme of Francis’ pontificate. Conservative and progressive Catholics alike have publicly challenged the authority of the pope and the Vatican, openly or implicitly hinting at an irreparable fracture in the church.
Recently the pope has moved against his critics on the right, excommunicating former U.S. papal nuncio Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò for the crime of schism, forcing Cardinal Raymond Burke, the informal dean of the dissident right, from his Vatican post and removing Bishop Joseph Strickland from his seat in Tyler, Texas, for his anti-Francis agitation, mostly on social media.
For these and other conservatives, the pope has done too much to reconcile the church with modern social trends: opening its doors to women who want leadership roles and the LGBTQ+ faithful, restricting the saying of the Old Latin Mass and accommodating Beijing’s influence on the church in China.
Liberal Catholics, meanwhile, claim Francis has done too little to promote inclusivity and accountability in the church, calling on him to allow women to become deacons and blessings for same-sex couples and to do more to solve the issue of clergy sexual abuse. These issues have motivated the German church’s Synodal Path, a yearslong movement to answer popular drift away from the church with progressive, and largely unsanctioned, reforms.
Schism is nothing new in the church, starting with the Great Schism of 1054, which created the divide between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism before the Protestant Reformation fragmented the Western church in the 16th century. The most recent faction to fall into schism was the traditionalist Society of St. Pius X, founded in 1970 by the French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the changes of the Second Vatican Council and consecrated his own bishops, for which he was excommunicated.
FILE – In this Nov. 16, 2015 file photo, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore.
Viganò is thought to come the closest to provoking a similar split. In 2019, as Francis addressed the disastrous aftermath of the clerical abuse crisis in Ireland, Viganò published a fiery document accusing the pope of covering up the abuse of minors by ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and calling for him to resign. Since then, he has called Francis “a heretic” and a “tyrant” and condemned the reforms of the Second Vatican Council while drawing closer to conspiratorial and radical wings of the church.
Setting himself up at the hermitage of St. Antonio alla Palanzana, about an hour from Rome, Viganò drew a crowd of discontented Catholics: evicted nuns, wealthy Italian aristocrats and reactionary priests. He created an organization, Exsurge Domine, with the goal of offering help and financial support to clergy who claim to have been persecuted for their traditionalist views.
But experts say Francis has skillfully dealt with critics on both sides by waiting for the right moment to act and by issuing documents clarifying his most controversial pronouncements. Massimo Borghesi, a philosopher and author of the 2022 book “Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis,” Viganò can no longer be considered a representative voice of the conservative opposition to the pope.
“I don’t think that Viganò’s excommunication implies a schism,” Borghesi told Religion News Service on Monday (July 15). “It might still concern an absolute minority of traditionalists who believe that the church in Rome has betrayed the tradition of the church following the Second Vatican Council,” he said, but he has reached the apex of his following in the United States, where he had seen the most support.
“I don’t think this interests the majority of the American church,” said Borghese.
According to an April 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, a three-quarter majority of Catholics in the U.S. view the pope favorably. Even though the country’s political polarization is a factor in their opinion — almost 9 in 10 Catholic Democrats support Francis, compared to 63% of Republican faithful — conservative Catholics recognize that the pope’s election was legitimate, even if they dislike his policies, Borghesi said.
“The conditions for the schism are not there. They are simply awaiting the next pope,” he said.
If Francis had gone after the archbishop in 2019 or 2020, Borghesi believes, he might have created a deeper split. Instead, he allowed time for tensions to pass and for many of his reforms to be assimilated into church life. In the meantime, Viganó’s increasingly radical positions have served to alienate his staunchest American supporters, who have stayed mostly quiet since the Vatican’s sentence in early July.
“These processes have cooled spirits and allowed more clarity within the church,” he said.
Similarly, Vatican chroniclers say, Francis has come through the direst threat from the left, as the German church’s Synodal Path has retreated from its most radical positions.
Dr. Katharina Westerhorstmann, German theologan and Professor of Theology and Medical Ethics at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
In 2022, German theologian Katharina Westerhorstmann announced she was resigning from the synodal commission that was studying relationships and sexuality because the Synodal Path’s rejection of official Catholic doctrine had drifted dangerously toward schism.
“For me there were some discussions that crossed the line, especially the notion where they seemed to have already decided where this was going and that those opinions that didn’t fit into that direction, shouldn’t really count,” Westerhorstmann said.
She and a group of theologians believed that while reforms were necessary to ensure safeguarding for children and vulnerable adults in the church, certain doctrinal aspects should remain unchanged. Westerhorstmann told RNS that while a schism was a definite possibility between 2020 and 2021, that is no longer the case today, despite a flare-up last year, when priests in Germany began blessing same-sex couples in violation of Rome’s ban on the practice.
“Right now, it seems that the negotiations with the Vatican are going well; there is more openness maybe on both sides,” she said. “In fact, I would say that there is no risk of a schism in the German church anymore at all.”
Both extremes now await the next conclave and the future pope, where the future of the Catholic Church will once again be decided.
Some observers say the greatest threat to the church today is not passionate dissent but disinterest.
“Some Catholic circles, not just conservatives, are drawing away from the church” said Porfiri. “I would describe this as a schism of indifference, where some Catholics are leaving the church, not because they object to one particular aspect or issue, but because they are no longer engaged.”
After a Washington Attorney General’s Office investigation alleging that the Dioceses of Seattle, Spokane and Yakima used charitable funds to cover-up sex abuse was halted by a superior court judge on Friday, clergy abuse advocates are still demanding accountability.
Abuse survivors and reform advocates from the Catholic Accountability Project (CAP) traveled from Seattle to Spokane and Yakima on Tuesday promising that the AG investigation into alleged abuse cover-ups would be appealed to Washington’s Supreme Court.
“It was a very sad day last week for survivors in court to have that kind of a setback, but we’re very hopeful about what the attorney general has committed to do in appealing this case,” CAP advocate Sarah Pearson said.
Pearson helped to organize thousands of pages of abuse documentation ahead of the AG’s office filing investigating subpoenas against the three dioceses. She asserted that Bishop Thomas Daly’s office was actively avoiding addressing the issue.
“Those were 7,500 pages of evidence that contained some of the worst things I’ve ever read…and a large portion of that material is from the Diocese of Spokane,” Pearson said. “Bishop Daly of Spokane is actively obstructing that investigation by refusing to cooperate.”
Mary Dispenza, a co-founding member of CAP and a clergy abuse survivor, is looking forward to the AG’s office appealing the investigation subpoenas, which would allow investigators to review materials that could purportedly show the use of charitable funds to hide systemic child sex abuse across dioceses in Washington.
“For a while I thought ‘the Church is just too big, you cannot fight the Church,’ but I had to let go of that very quickly, because I want to win. I want to win for survivors, and for truth, healing and justice,” Dispenza said.
CAP cofounder Tim Law cited the 2023 Washington Supreme Court case Wolf v. State as a good sign that the Seattle Superior Court order turning down the investigative subpoenas could be overturned in favor of abuse survivors.
Wolf v. State ruled that the statute of limitations on filing sex abuse charges against an institution does not begin when the crime took place, but rather when the victim becomes aware of the negligence of the organization that allowed said abuse to happen. It opened the way for the prosecution of decades-old cases and was a major win for clergy abuse advocates.
CAP members say they met with Deputy Attorney General Todd Bowers and Assistant Attorney General Nathan Bays on Wednesday. As current AG Bob Ferguson (D) runs for governor, Pearson says that his office has assured them that the investigation into the Church will continue past Ferguson’s administration.
“It’s absolutely essential that survivors are central to the whole process. We are so pleased that we’ve been able to have this meeting–it was long overdue. We have made plans to meet again to continue discussing how survivors can be involved in this process–especially when it comes to outreach and support,” Pearson said.
The Diocese of Spokane referred back to a statement sent to media outlets on May 9 stating that it is unaware of any new abuse allegations and asserting that all information about sexual crimes committed by clergy has been shared with the public.
Peter Isely, an abuse survivor and CAP member, said that the dioceses are hiding behind lawyers and obfuscating their responsibility to be truthful about the use of charitable funds to protect the Church’s image.
“They have to be held accountable. There’s a principle of justice that a decent society uses when there’s an issue that involves children…What’s in the best interest of the child?…They refuse, categorically, to cooperate in a state-wide child abuse investigation,” Isely said.
CAP continues to call upon survivors to report clergy abuse to the attorney general by calling (833) 952-6277.
While the attorney general’s lawsuit is requesting permission to subpoena Catholic dioceses for alleged sex abuse documentation, several kinds of Roman Catholic priests do not fall under the direct authority of diocesan bishops. Members of religious orders, as well as Catholic sisters and nuns, are under the authority of their provincials.
A history of sexual abuse of Indigenous peoples and students at institutions run by religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits has motivated CAP to call for additional subpoenas of Church institutions not under the direct authority of the Spokane, Seattle and Yakima dioceses.
In the long term, reform advocates hope that the Church will actively participate in healing from decades of silence in the face of abuse by religious leaders.
“It will never be the Church it can be until it deals with the past,” Dispenza said.
An foundation says a legendary French priest and a lifelong advocate of the homeless has been accused of committing acts that would amount to “sexual assault or sexual harassment.”
By BARBARA SURK
A legendary French priest and a lifelong advocate of the homeless has been accused of committing acts that would amount to “sexual assault or sexual harassment,” his foundation said Wednesday, in the latest instance of a Catholic spiritual leader facing allegations of abusing his power to harm women.
Abbé Pierre, who died in 2007, was one of France’s most beloved public figures. The founder of the international Emmaus Community for the poor, Abbé Pierre had served as part of France’s conscience since the 1950s, when he persuaded Parliament to pass a law — still on the books — forbidding landlords to evict tenants during winter.
Several women have accused the late priest of sexual assault or harassment between the end of the 1970s and 2005, his foundation said in a statement. It explained that it is making public the allegations of seven women, including one who was a minor at the time, after reviewing the report of an expert firm that specializes in violence prevention and was commissioned to listen to women’s testimonies and analyze them.
The women reported unsolicited kissing and touching, as well as inappropriate sexual comments and propositions, according to the report from the Groupe Egaé firm.
“The Emmaus Community is making public the acts that may amount to sexual assault or sexual harassment, committed by Abbé Pierre,” the statement said. It added that several other women had “suffered comparable acts” of sexual abuse but were unable to be heard. Some had died, some could not be contacted and others declined to be interviewed.
The alleged victims were employees, volunteers with the foundation or some of its member organizations, or young women in Abbé Pierre’s personal entourage, the statement said.
The foundation has set up a confidential system for other potential victims to come forward, for “collecting testimonies and providing support to people who were victims of or witnessed unacceptable behavior on the part of Abbé Pierre,” the statement said.
The Vatican doesn’t usually comment on individual cases of alleged abuse and didn’t immediately respond when asked about Abbé Pierre.
In 2021, an independent commission on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church estimated that some 330,000 children were sexually abused over 70 years by priests or other church-related figures in France.
The allegations against Abbé Pierre are the latest in a series of cases of Catholic spiritual giants accused of abusing their power and authority to take sexual advantage of the women under their spiritual sway.
France has recently had to contend with revelations about another beloved 20th century Catholic figure, Jean Vanier, who founded the L’Arche federation in the 1960s to care for people with intellectual disabilities. Recently, L’Arche commissioned investigations that found the late Vanier perverted Catholic doctrine about Jesus and Mary to justify his sexual compulsions to abuse women.
Prior to that were revelations of serial sexual abuse of adults in religious communities founded by two French brothers, the Rev. Thomas Philippe and Rev. Marie-Dominique Philippe, called L’Eau Vive and Community of Saint Jean, respectively. Thomas Philippe was a spiritual father to Vanier and allegedly initiated Vanier into his mystical-sexual practices at L’Eau Vive.
More recently, the Vatican and the Jesuit religious order have been contending with the scandal over the famous ex-Jesuit artist, Rev. Marko Rupnik, who has been accused by more than 20 women of spiritual, psychological and sexual abuse going back decades.
The Vatican reopened the Rupnik case after an international outcry that the priest, whose mosaics decorate basilicas and shrines around the world, received favorable treatment from the Jesuits including Pope Francis. Rupnik hasn’t responded to the allegations, but the Jesuits kicked him out of the order last year after finding the women’s claims were “very highly credible.”
“Allegation after allegation, secular investigation after another clearly shows that no institution knew more and no institution has done less to help victims,” said Mike McDonnell, communications director of the U.S.-based clergy abuse survivor group SNAP. “We can’t help but think about the victims who have yet to come forward.”
The Vatican has long refused to take action against charismatic spiritual leaders abusing their power to sexually harm women, making a clear distinction between abuse of minors and adults. The church has long insisted that any sexual activity between a priest and an adult woman is sinful but consensual, and has tended to blame the woman for seducing an otherwise holy priest.
The church has had to rethink that dynamic in the #MeToo era and acknowledge that free consent may not be possible given the imbalanced power differentials between priest and parishioner or nun.
