Francis’s child protection summit a high-stakes gamble

child protection summit

Wednesday’s big Vatican story was clearly the announcement that Pope Francis has summoned all the presidents of national conferences of Catholic bishops from around the world, more than 100 prelates in all, to Rome Feb. 21-24 for a session on “the protection of minors.”

The immediate reaction was to assume this was a Vatican effort to reshape the narrative about Francis and the Church’s clerical sexual abuse scandals, after what has been an exceptionally brutal month.

It began with the Pennsylvania grand jury report in mid-August, and it culminated with a bombshell accusation two weeks ago from his former ambassador in the U.S. that Francis knew about sexual misconduct allegations against former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick five years ago and ignored them.

For sure, the February meeting has “not business as usual” written all over it.

It’s rare for the Vatican to summon all the presidents of the world’s bishops’ conferences for any reason, and it’s the first time ever the Vatican has convened such a cross-section of senior leadership to talk about the abuse crisis.

What the pope and his advisors may have had in mind going this route is the example of Chile.

As that country’s abuse crisis heated up in 2016 and 2017, Francis was widely perceived as hostile to victims, even accusing them of “calumny” in January of this year for continuing to criticize a bishop they believe has covered up for their abuser.

Things turned around quickly, however, when Francis summoned all the bishops of Chile to Rome in May, at the end of which they all turned in their resignations.

The pope also read the Chilean prelates the riot act, bluntly charging that some of them were guilty not merely of turning a blind eye but of active participation in cover-ups, such as destruction of evidence to impede criminal probes.

The net effect was to suggest that Francis had gone from being part of the problem to key to the solution, and it more or less snuffed out what had been a potential media bonfire.

Since then some of that momentum has diminished as Francis has only accepted the resignations of five of those bishops, and without any public explanation as to why.

Despite that, many people a month ago still would have given him the benefit of the doubt.

By way of analogy, Francis and his team may be thinking that summoning presidents of bishops’ conferences could have the same tonic effect on the current atmosphere, projecting images of a pope resolved to get this right.

What they may not fully realize, however, is how much bigger this is than Chile.

In fact, this may well be the highest-stakes gamble of Francis’s papacy, because if this goes wrong, the consequences could be crippling on a global scale.

Over the last five and a half years, dozens of times I have found myself in conversations – sometimes with Church people, sometimes with colleagues in the media, sometimes on the lecture circuit – the subject of which is, “Can anything end the public love affair with this pope?” Continue reading

  • John L. Allen Jr. is the editor of Crux, specializing in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church.
  • Image: Revistaepoca
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