Vatican City: If Pope Francis needed a concrete example to justify summoning church leaders from around the globe to Rome for a tutorial on clergy sex abuse, Sister Bernardine Pemii has it.
The nun, who recently completed a course on child protection policies at Rome’s Jesuit university, has been advising her bishop in Ghana on an abuse case, instructing him to invite the victim to his office to hear her story before opening an investigation.
“If Pemii hadn’t stepped in? It would have been covered. There would have been complete silence,” Pemii told The Associated Press recently.
“And nothing would have happened. Nobody would have listened to the victim.”
Francis is convening this week’s summit at the Vatican to prevent cover-ups by Catholic superiors everywhere, as many around the world continue to protect the church’s reputation at all costs, denying that priests rape children and by discrediting victims even as new cases keep coming to light.
History’s first Latin American pope has made many of the same mistakes. As archbishop in Buenos Aires, he went out of his way to defend a famous street priest who was later convicted of abuse.
Francis realized last year he had erred. “I was part of the problem,” Francis told Chilean survivor Juan Carlos Cruz during a private meeting at the Vatican in June.
The pope has now done an about-face and is bringing the rest of the church leadership along with him at the extraordinary summit that starts on Thursday.
The meeting will bring together some 190 presidents of bishops’ conferences, religious orders and Vatican offices for four days of lectures and workshops on preventing sex abuse in their churches, tending to victims, and investigating abuse when it does occur.
The Vatican isn’t expecting any miracles, and the pope himself has called for expectations to be “deflated.” But organizers say the meeting nevertheless marks a turning point in the way the Catholic Church has dealt with the problem, with Francis’ own conversion last year a key point of departure. (AP)
