Church abuse hangs over Pope Francis’s Youth Day trip to Portugal
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LISBON — After Portugal was picked to host Pope Francis and hundreds of thousands of young Catholics for a World Youth Day gathering that opens here this week, local bishops scrambled to demonstrate they were in step with what Francis has proclaimed as a new era of accountability for sexual abuse within the church.
“It was like cleaning the house before the visitor arrived,” said the Rev. António Pedro Monteiro, a Catholic chaplain.
The bishops financed an independent commission to examine a long-evaded question: How many people in Portugal had been victims of church predators? The result was a nearly 500-page report released in February — similar to audits elsewhere in Europe and the Americas — that determined at least 4,815 children had been abused since 1950. The bishops commended “this difficult and dramatic work” and expressed hope that it “marks a new beginning.”
Critics say that commitment was mostly for show. As the pope prepares to address Catholic youth in Lisbon, the church is under fire from those who say that despite a cornerstone pledge from Francis and highly publicized reforms, abuse claims are too often handled with the same resistance and obfuscation of the past.
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Portuguese commission members who spoke with The Washington Post described how church officials sought to thwart their work. And victims expressed outrage that only a few priests were even briefly suspended, while church officials declined to fully investigate others.
One woman who said she was raped by a priest while studying to become a nun learned after testifying to the commission that church officials had closed her case. A letter from her bishop, shared with her by a religious order working on her behalf and seen by The Post, explained that no further investigation would be done because she was the priest’s only accuser and she appeared too “fragile” for further questioning. The priest remained active in ministry, though the letter said he would be asked to trim back his international travel, visit the bishop monthly, donate to a charity for children at risk and pray the rosary daily.
“The independent commission tried to do the best they could for the victims — but the church doesn’t want to deal with this,” said Filipa, the 43-year-old woman, who spoke on the condition that her last name be withheld to protect her privacy.
In the archdiocese of Lisbon, Cardinal Manuel Clemente initially refused to suspend active priests named in the commission’s report. Alleged victims had been granted anonymity, leaving accusations murky, his spokeswoman Rosa Amaral told The Post. And some of the claims, the cardinal told the local press, were based on incidents that happened in a different era when “mere indecent assaults were settled with kind words.”
In response to public uproar, Clemente suspended four active priests. Three returned to ministry after three months — internal investigations could not substantiate the allegations against them.
In an April mass for priests where he requested institutional forgiveness from abuse victims, Clemente, 75, announced he would soon step down, though his office maintains that the church’s record on abuse and his retirement are unconnected.
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Commission members said Portuguese church officials also undermined the independent inquiry while it was underway. Five senior bishops provided demonstrably false testimony, said Ana Nunes de Almeida, a Portuguese sociologist who described herself as the commission’s only practicing Catholic.
“I knew the church would be difficult to work with, but I was surprised when they lied,” she said.
The church, she said, withheld access to vital archives for months. Some dioceses resisted displaying the commission hotline number and email prominently on their websites. Before, during and after the commission’s investigation, several bishops issued public statements seemingly trivializing abuse.
“The culture of the church must change,” said Nunes de Almeida. “The victims must be at the forefront, and they aren’t.”
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The head of the bishops’ conference here, José Ornelas, disputed portrayals of the church as uncooperative, while conceding that public communication, including his own, had not always been ideal. “I understand that some words which were used were not appropriate for the case, even [from] me,” he said.
Ornelas said he maintained a good working relationship with the commission and sought dialogue with victims. “I met some of the victims who had their lives completely destroyed by [abuse], and that’s not something I can [easily] sleep [with],” he said. “It’s very difficult — it hurts me also because it happened inside my institution.”
Out of six commission members, two interviewed by The Post were sharply critical of the church’s level of cooperation. Two others declined to comment, although one had previously expressed concerns in the Portuguese press. Another could not be reached.
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The sixth member — commission head Pedro Strecht — described “different positions” within the Portuguese church. He said a majority of bishops who had “requested the study” had allowed the commission to act without “external interference.” But a certain “passive opposition” remained.
“This is a fundamental question for the future, which the presence of the pope [in Portugal] will not fail to reinforce: the Catholic Church cannot organize itself in a divided way in relation to this matter,” he said in a statement to The Post. “On this, there remains only one inevitable solution: that is to follow the unequivocal voice of its highest representative, Francis.”
A pledge from the pope
The pope this week will focus the Catholic world on its youth, celebrating an event popularized decades ago by John Paul II. Francis is also scheduled to meet with Portuguese abuse victims, signaling that their experiences have been acknowledged at the top of the church hierarchy.
But victims and their advocates say Francis’s efforts to establish a culture of accountability and regain church credibility are floundering.
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“The proof that nothing has changed in the church is here,” said Cristina Amaral, who testified to the Portuguese commission and is one of the victims scheduled to meet with Francis this week. “First, they took a while to remove the active priests. To shut [critics] up, they finally suspended them. And now they’ve come back [to ministry]. The church lives in a state of impunity.”
She continued, “I admire the person of Pope Francis a lot, but I think that, as head of the church, he could have done more in this matter. I want to tell him that.”
What Francis has done includes convening bishops for an unprecedented summit on clerical abuse in 2019. He then issued rules on how abuse claims should be handled, requiring that priests and nuns report all allegations to church authorities and that dioceses set up offices to receive complaints. He promised transparency — and a new emphasis on the needs of victims.
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Yet church officials often haven’t followed the new rules, anti-abuse campaigners say.
In March, the Rev. Hans Zollner, a prominent member of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, resigned citing continued problems achieving the commission’s goals of “responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency.”
This month, Francis had to dispatch a team of trusted investigators to Peru to investigate abuse and other allegations that remained unresolved by national church authorities.
Behind the headlines on abuse audits
The proliferation of audits on clerical abuse in different countries has gone some ways toward documenting the scale of the problem. Wherever people have looked, from Australia to Maryland, a stunning number of cases has been found.
But critics say these inquiries have continued to encounter resistance from the church.
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“Catholic bishops worldwide are still refusing to cooperate with investigations of clergy sex abuse,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of watchdog group BishopAccountability.org. “We see them obstructing even inquiries that they themselves have commissioned.”
In Germany, the archbishop of Cologne, Rainer Woelki, refused to release one law firm’s findings, citing flawed methodology. He commissioned another firm for a do-over — which victims’ advocate Matthias Katsch said came out sounding like “a defense lawyer defending his client.” The lead author, Cologne lawyer Björn Gercke, contested that description, saying it had been “significantly more unpleasant” for the diocese.
A 2021 report commissioned by the French church is regularly cited as a model of accountability. But even there, commission member Stéphane de Navacelle said in an interview, one diocese refused to provide access to archives, citing European privacy laws. And church officials on the island of Guadeloupe didn’t notify parishioners of the group’s arrival — then told reporters that a lack of participants suggested a lack of abuse.
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“I don’t know if you’d call that obstruction, but it’s certainly not cooperation,” de Navacelle said.
In Spain, a state investigation of clerical abuse launched last year has been running parallel to an inquiry commissioned by the church. The attorney general’s office told The Post that only 12 out of 70 Catholic dioceses have provided substantive details on abuse cases and 27 have failed to reply to information requests altogether.
It is unclear whether the church has been more forthcoming in its own probes. Anti-abuse campaigners have questioned the selection of a law firm headed by a member of the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei to lead an independent investigation. In a telephone interview with The Post, the firm denied any bias. A separate, preliminary report from the Spanish church in June revealed abuse on a smaller scale than would be expected based on assessments in other countries.
“We don’t really understand the purpose of the report [commissioned by the church], but we understand the church might be concerned about reputation damage and the potential economic compensation they could be confronted with,” said an official with Spanish public prosecutor’s office who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
How Portugal’s abuse report haltingly came to be
In Portugal, church officials had watched the audits being done elsewhere and said their World Youth Day selection in 2019 was a catalyst to commission their own.
“We thought it was better to know [the scope of abuse here] before than going on from suspicion to suspicion,” Ornelas said.
Not all senior clerics agreed. The bishop of Porto, Manuel Linda, dismissed abuse by clergy in Portugal as fantasy and publicly opposed a commission. “If it’s only — as has been disclosed — to collect complaints, then it is not justified, because so far we have not had any cases, thank God,” he told a national radio station.
It took until January 2022 for the Portuguese commission to get underway, working on a 12-month deadline.
But Nunes de Almeida said seven months passed before members could access church archives — she said that Ivo Scapolo, who acts as the Vatican’s ambassador to Portugal, insisted that additional clearance was required from the Holy See.
Scapolo declined repeated requests for comment.
Ornelas said he went to Rome to clear up the matter with senior Vatican officials, who confirmed further permission shouldn’t be necessary because Francis had abolished secrecy laws surrounding sexual abuse. “It was clear for the pope” that the committee should have access to church records, he said. “But it wasn’t clear for everyone else.”
By the time the issue was resolved, the commission was limited in how many cases it could document.
“It took ages, it was just ridiculous,” said Catarina Vasconcelos, a Portuguese filmmaker who also served on the commission. “You could feel that there were some who really wanted to shut the door.”
Nunes de Almeida said the commission caught several bishops in apparent lies, a point noted in the report. One bishop claimed to have no knowledge of any abuse cases, though a priest testified he had informed that bishop about his abuse by an older priest.
In October, as the commission still labored, the bishop of Porto went on national television and declared there was no obligation to report abuse. “Even today, officially, sexual abuse is not a public crime,” he said.
Two weeks of outrage later, the bishop apologized, conceding that the reality of sexual abuse in the church was “much darker” than he thought.
After the report was out, church officials said follow-up wasn’t straightforward. Accusers had been granted anonymity, and some could not recall the full names of their alleged assailants. In cases where names and detailed allegations were provided, some bishops quickly suspended priests and launched investigations, while others — most notably in Lisbon — initially balked. Under public pressure, 14 priests across Portugal were ultimately suspended. Half of them are back at work.
Nunes de Almeida said she was aware of at least four others who remained active — including the priest accused by Filipa and told to pray.
The Portuguese church has now appointed a wholly new panel to investigate allegations. Its mission: to re-contact victims and assess their willingness to go on the record.
“We need real people,” Ornelas said, “and not just anonymous accusations.”
Beatriz Rios in Brussels contributed to this report.
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Source: The Washington Post
