Italian Bishops to Examine Clerical Abuse, but Only to a Point - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Italian Bishops’ Conference on Friday presented its plan to investigate clerical abuse, but critics say it is insufficient and disappointing.
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Seeking to address the concerns about the revelations of abuse that have devastated the church worldwide, the bishops announced that they would commission a report examining cases from 2020-21, to be published in November, as well as a second report that would analyze how clerical abuse had been handled in Italy in the past two decades.
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Victims groups and their advocates in Italy have been frustrated by the church’s failure to follow in the footsteps of other countries — including Australia, Ireland and the United States — that have commissioned fully independent investigations carried out by third parties.
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“It is insufficient,” Federica Tourn, a member of a recently created umbrella group called ItalyChurchToo, said Friday. “Why didn’t they order up a completely independent investigation? It’s one thing to give third parties access to documentation and archives, quite another to let the church decide what gets to be seen.”
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In 2019, Pope Francis held a landmark meeting at the Vatican on clerical sexual abuse and called “for an all-out battle against the abuse of minors.” But the Italian church still dragged its feet.
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will only analyze cases reported to local church centers from the years 2020-21, essentially “only a small percentage of reported cases of abuse,”
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Critics of the Italian bishops’ plan said that capping the investigation to the past 22 years risked leaving out thousands of cases.
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There is a kind of reluctance to deal with this phenomenon because politics knows that it is going against the church and in Italy the church is still a point of reference.”