Pope Francis (Reuters)
As a group of experts read aloud some of the harrowing testimonies they had received from newly discovered victims of sexual abuse in the Portuguese Catholic Church, the country’s leading bishops looked visibly uncomfortable in the front rows of the auditorium.
In a live televised intervention, experts reported in February that at least 4,815 boys and girls had been abused since 1950, the majority between the ages of 10 and 14.
Before those shocking findings, Portuguese church leaders had reiterated that there had been only a handful of cases of clergy sexual abuse. They further lost credibility with such a clumsy and hesitant response that the first survivors’ advocacy group in Portugal inspired victims to claim compensation.
Pope Francis will enter fully into the entire process of reflection in Portugal, around this legacy of clerical abuses and cover-ups, when he arrives in Lisbon next Wednesday to participate in World Youth Day, an international event for young Catholics. Although there are no mentions of the scandal on the pontiff’s agenda, he is expected to meet with victims during his visit.
Francis will also visit the sanctuary of Fátima, a rural Portuguese town that is one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations for the Catholic Church. In 1917, three Portuguese shepherd boys reported seeing visions of the Virgin Mary on a tree there, a landmark event in 20th-century Catholic history.
Antonio Grosso, who says he was sexually abused at a former religious children’s shelter in Fatima in the 1960s, points to the stark contrast in the Church’s attitude.
Antonio Grosso tears up after reading aloud a letter from his daughter praising her courage in going public with her story of sexual abuse (AP Photo/Armando Franca)
Church authorities “don’t believe what the victims tell them, but they do believe little children who say they heard the lady about (a tree),” said the 70-year-old retired bank employee.
Portugal has been the country most recently facing decades of abuse by priests and cover-ups by bishops and religious superiors. However, Portuguese church leaders seem to have learned little from their colleagues in the United States, the rest of Europe and Latin America, who faced similar crises.
Since the publication of the report, the Portuguese hierarchy has been changing its opinion on the possible – not yet decided – issue of reparation payments to the victims. He has hesitated to suspend active members of the clergy named in the report.
Anne Barrett Doyle of BishopAccountability.org, a US group that maintains an online archive on abuses in the Catholic Church, said the Portuguese bishops hoped the independent commission would help restore trust by exposing past abuses and cover-ups to the time that allowed them to “apologize, make reform promises and move on.”
“Your plan went terribly wrong,” he said in an email. “With the discovery of nearly 5,000 victims and its shocking claim that priests were still officially accused, the commission turned out to be more independent than the bishops expected (…) It was a disastrous miscalculation.”
Faced with the devastating findings, Church leaders first argued that possible reparations were a matter for the courts, which in Portugal have a backlog of pending cases and are known for being slow to make decisions, often taking years. . Lisbon Cardinal Manuel Clemente said the Church would only do what the courts decided it had to do.
“Everything that can be done according to the law will be done according to the law,” Clemente said. “But don’t expect us to do anything else, because we can’t do anything else.”
The president of the Portuguese episcopal conference, Bishop Jose Ornelas (AP Photo/Armando Franca, File)
He and other officials stressed that according to Portuguese law, the person responsible for any compensation is the aggressor, not the institution to which he belongs.
Clemente said it would be “insulting” to offer reparations to the victims. Furthermore, he and other members of the Church claimed that in an online survey conducted by the commission of experts, none of the victims said they were seeking compensation. The commission told The Associated Press that was not true.
By April, the Church had softened the message, saying it was not ruling out repairs. He promised to “be available” to victims, saying if convicted offenders couldn’t pay, the Church would. Those plans have not materialized.
Clement also assured that the Independent Committee for the Study of the Abuse of Minors in the Catholic Church, a group of experts made up of Portuguese ecclesiastical authorities, had given the institution only a list of alleged aggressors that was not supported by evidence.
That comment angered the experts, who said they had gone out of their way to back up their findings and provide supporting documentation, such as statements from admissible witnesses in court.
Faithful celebrate a vigil of silence and prayer for the victims of sexual abuse by the Catholic Church in front of the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon (AP/file)
In addition, church authorities said that still-serving clerics designated as alleged offenders could only be suspended from their duties after due process of law in which they could present their defense, presumably in court. Under public pressure, they later suspended four of the dozen priests identified in the report.
The Church promised last March to build a memorial to the victims that would be unveiled during World Youth Day celebrations. A few weeks before the pope’s arrival, in another embarrassing episode, he abandoned the plan, saying without elaborating that something would be done later.
Grosso, the abuse victim, said he and others had been so “outraged and very affected” by the Church’s response that they created a lobby group, called the Silenced Heart Association, to help victims receive reparations. The group will also provide psychological support and legal assistance at no cost to survivors.
Grosso’s personal experience has taken him from being a boy aspiring priest studying in a Portuguese seminary to co-founding the first association for victims of sexual abuse in the Church of Portugal. As a child, he says, he enjoyed mass so much that he would recreate it at home.
But between the ages of 10 and 12, when he was studying away from home, Grosso said he was sexually abused first by a priest and then by a Franciscan monk.
Marked by the trauma and the feeling of guilt, he did not speak to anyone about what happened for 10 years. As a teenager he suffered episodes of “anger, humiliation, shame.” As a result, the boy who wanted to be a priest became an atheist adult.
He didn’t start raising the subject with friends until he was a young adult. He told his girlfriend, who became his wife. They had two daughters.
When Grosso went public with his story in an interview in a Portuguese magazine in 2002, spurred on by revelations of church sexual abuse spreading around the world, his 27-year-old daughter Barbara sent him a handwritten letter. She has carried it folded in her purse for the past two decades. The letter celebrates his courage and tells him that his daughter is proud of him. Reading it aloud brings tears to her eyes.
He now feels motivated to act, he said, because the Church reacted with “disdain” to the torment of the victims and continues to try to hide the truth. He would like to see Pope Francis speak on the issue during his stay in Portugal.
A banner with an image of Pope Francis announcing World Youth Day 2023 is seen above a church in Lisbon (AP Photo/Armando Franca)
The Church in Portugal has apologized for the abuses. He works with the main association for the support of victims in the country and is introducing protocols and adjusting his responses to sexual abuse in the institution. World Youth Day staff receive specific training on how to prevent and identify abuse.
The problem, however, goes beyond Portugal, Barrett Doyle said.
The process in Portugal lags behind what has already happened in the United States, Australia, France and Germany, he noted, but on par with the ecclesiastical response in Spain and Poland and most countries in Central and South America and Africa. .
“In other words, unfortunately the Portuguese hierarchy is not an isolated case, it is representative,” he said.