John Allen hadde i går et grundig intervju med Bostons kardinal Sean O’Malley, som har mer erfaring med overgrepsskandalene inne Kirken enn de aller fleste andre – etter at han kom til Boston for å rydde opp etter den store skandalen der i 2002. Allen oppsummerer intervjuet i disse fire puktene, men les gjerne hele intervjuet her:
O’Malley said he “definitely” agrees with a recent statement from one of his brother cardinals, effectively rebuking another for insensitivity on the sexual abuse crisis. Cardinal Christoph Schönborn of Vienna, Austria, told reporters in late April that comments comparing criticism of Pope Benedict to “petty gossip” by Cardinal Angelo Sodano – who was John Paul II’s Secretary of State for fifteen years, and still the dean of the College of Cardinals – did “massive harm” to victims. Schönborn also faulted Sodano for his role in blocking an investigation of sex abuse charges against his predecessor in Vienna, Cardinal Hans Hermann Gröer. O’Malley agreed, saying Schönborn has had a deep “pastoral experience” of the crisis.
O’Malley said the church shouldn’t be threatened by a critical analysis of how the crisis was handled by officials such as Sodano during the John Paul years, conceding that some Vatican officials “didn’t understand the seriousness of the problem or all its implications.” O’Malley insisted, however, that it would be unfair to impugn John Paul himself, since the crisis didn’t erupt until his health was already compromised and there was a tendency to “shelter” him from the worst of it.
O’Malley said Pope Benedict’s words aboard the papal plane were “very helpful,” but expressed doubt that it will immediately halt a tendency to point fingers at outside forces – saying that trying to get senior officials on the same page is sometimes akin to “herding cats.”
O’Malley said that going forward, any bishop who knowingly transfers a priest facing credible charges of sexual abuse “should be removed.”
Og fra selve intervjuet tar jeg med et par avsnitt:
On the way to Portugal, the pope made some striking comments on the papal plane about the sexual abuse crisis. In effect, he said the problem isn’t so much outside attacks but rather the reality of sin inside the church. What did you think of that?
I think it’s very helpful that the Holy Father wants us to focus on the cause of the crisis, which is not anti-Catholicism. That’s always there, and people will always find things to criticize. Fundamentally, however, this is a problem that is of our own making. In great part, it’s due to our sinfulness, our human frailty, cowardice, many different failings that contributed to the crisis. It was helpful for him to articulate that, particularly because while we were getting beat up constantly in the Times, you did kind of want to strike back. But it begs the question as to why this happened in the first place.
There had been a fair bit of striking back, from some voices in the Vatican especially. Did you find that unhelpful?
It was not helpful. I was happy for some of the push-back that dealt with the facts, because many of the facts were distorted to put us in the very worst light. But our basic message has to be that we are repentant, that we are resolved to do everything to try to redress the wrongs the past, as much as we can, and to make sure that these situations don’t happen in the future. That requires a very definite policy, a strategy, which will need to be for the universal church, not just for the United States. For the longest time, this was kind of dismissed as an American problem. Now we see it’s a human problem, and in the church it’s become universal because the same deficiencies in dealing with the problem existed not just in the United States but in other places.
Is it your hope that in the wake of what the pope said on the plane, the finger-pointing is over?
I’m afraid it’s not. I wouldn’t be so optimistic. I think the Holy Father has shown himself to be aware of the dimensions of this problem and how serious it is for the church, and has been our closest ally in trying to correct it. But trying to bring everybody onto the same page is like trying to herd cats. I’m hoping that he will be able to assemble the kind of advisors he needs to come up with a very clear policy and message that could be put out there.