“This question remains one of the greatest challenges of the Church in our time”, wrote Pope Francis, who died on April 21, at the age of 88, in a text made public on June 15, 2023. He had just addressed, in a letter, to the Bolivian president, Luis Arce, to express him “” [sa] pain, [sa] shame and [sa] dismay ”, After revelations, by the local press, of dozens of sexual assaults committed by a priest in the country. Despite the unprecedented nature of the approach – a pope who writes to a head of state on a sex scandal -, the case had only aroused a limited excitement. In France, for example, almost no media had echoed it. It must be said that there was then as a (sad) air of already seen, too seen.
Liberation of speech
United States, Australia, Germany, France, Ireland, Portugal, Belgium, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia … In just over ten years of pontificate, François saw scandals bursting almost everywhere in the Catholic world. Hundreds of thousands of cases of pedocrime, sexual violence on women or men, grip or manipulation, often qualified, in pontifical vocabulary, by the word suitcase of “abuse”, committed by clerics or religious. The vast majority of facts do not go back to the pontificate of François, nor even to the XXIe century. But it is under his pontificate that they appeared so blatant.
You have 84.11% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
Source: Lemonde