Vatican City, Jun 2, 2018 / 03:42 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Survivors of sexual abuse and other abuses perpetrated by Chile’s most notorious abuser priest, Fernando Karadima, met with Pope Francis Saturday. They said they found a pope who not only listened and suffered with them, but who truly understood the depth of the crisis and the steps that are needed going forward.
“I came to Rome with three ideas. First, that he invited us, the advice that Peter would share with us, and also with hope. I have to say that the three things are confirmed and have exceeded my expectations,” Fr. Eugenio de la Fuente Lora told journalists June 2 after meeting with the pope.
Three fundamental takeaways from the encounter, he said, are the pope’s “listening, empathy and welcome.”
De la Fuente, who was a victim of Karadima’s abuse, voiced gratitude for feeling “completely understood by someone admirably empathetic, who suffered with my pain and understood it.”
Pope Francis, he said, “has a very deep understanding of the problem and… he has some very concrete ideas for how to advance, always on the short, medium and long term.”
Renewal won’t be immediate, but it will take time, he said, adding that the pope is “very clear” about what needs to be done.
De la Fuente is part of a second group of priests and victims of Chile’s most notorious abuser priest, Fr. Fernando Karadima. They are holding meetings with Pope Francis at the Vatican June 1-3.
Staying at the Santa Marta guesthouse, where Pope Francis lives, the group of nine includes five priests who were victims of abuse of power, conscience, and sexuality; two priests who have been assisting the victims; and two lay people.
In addition to De la Fuente, the group includes Fr. Francisco Javier Astaburuaga Ossa, a priest who accompanied victims Juan Carlos Cruz and James Hamilton before they went public about their abuse. Another victim of Karadima’s abuse, Fr. Alejandro Vial Amunátegui, is also in the group.
Two of the other priests who will meet with the pope are Fr. Javier Barros Bascuñán and Fr. Sergio Cobo Montalba. The remaining four participants have chosen not to go public.
Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu, who assisted Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna in the February investigation of the Chilean crisis, was also present. The two investigators will travel to Chile again in the coming days, this time visiting the Diocese of Osorno, rather than Santiago.
Saturday’s meeting with survivors began with 4 p.m. Mass June 2, after which the group stayed with the pope for four hours and fifteen minutes. Francis met them individually and as a group before taking his leave at 8:15 p.m. No other encounters with the pope are expected before the group returns to Chile.
In comments to the press after meeting with the pope, Astaburuaga said Francis focused heavily on the concept of the “holy faithful People of God” spoken of in the Second Vatican Council document “Lumen Gentium,” saying the Church must work harder to build an ecclesiology that has “a strong sense” of this concept.
“The people of God are essential, pastors are from the people of God and they are also there to serve the people of God,” Astaburuaga said, adding that all baptized are called to be “builders of the Church.”
The priest said that in order to change the “culture of abuse and concealment” Pope Francis spoke of in a recent letter to Chilean Catholics, a careful process of discernment is needed which takes three things into consideration: time, people and place.
When contemplating any decision, it’s important to think about “who are the people, places and times,” he said, stressing that the process of renewal in Chile is “the work of everyone, not just one.”
“This is why the pope insisted on returning to the concept of the people of God from the Second Vatican Council. We are all responsible: priests, bishops, laity, the holy people. It’s a joint task.”
Pope Francis, he said, listened “very carefully” when he spoke about his experience accompanying victims of abuse. “This is the testimony he gave us. To listen, and to listen with a lot of attention (and) a lot of trust.”
Though the process has at times been difficult, Astaburuaga said accompanying victims such as Cruz and Hamilton over the past 20 years “has its fruits,” and “it’s a great joy in the midst of their great suffering.”
Pope Francis, he said, also asked them to continue praying for the Church in Chile, particularly by emphasizing Eucharistic Adoration more strongly in local dioceses.
The pope also again asked for forgiveness in the name of the Church for the suffering each of them has lived, said Astaburuaga, who called the act “a great humility” on the part of the pope.
“I’ll go back to Chile with a lot of hope,” he said, adding that “beyond the difficulties there are, conflicts are always an opportunity. Conflicts that we have to face, but always with hope.”
Most of those who came to the Vatican for the June 2 meeting with the pope participated in an investigation of abuse cover-up by the hierarchy in Chile, which took place in February and was conducted by Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta and Msgr. Jordi Bertomeu of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The others worked with the investigation after the archbishop’s time in Chile.
This weekend’s gathering conclude the pope’s first round of meetings with the victims of abuses which occurred at Karadima’s Sacred Heart parish in Santiago.
Pope Francis said Mass for the group June 2, after which he met the nine as a group before holding individual conversations. He had met with three more of Karadima’s victims, Juan Carlos Cruz, James Hamilton, and Andres Murillo, at the Vatican April 27-30.
Karadima was convicted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2011 of abusing minors, and sentenced to a life of prayer and penance. He has not been sentenced by civil courts because of Chile’s statue of limitations.
A priestly association Karadima was involved in and which he had led for many years, the Priestly Union of the Sacred Heart, was suppressed within a year of his conviction.
Attention to Karadima’s abuse has heightened since the appointment of Bishop Juan de la Cruz Barros Madrid to the Diocese of Osorno in 2015. Barros had been accused of both covering up and at times participating in Karadima’s abuses.
Pope Francis initially defended Barros, saying he had received no evidence of the bishop’s guilt, and called accusations against him “calumny” during a trip to Chile in January. He later relented, and sent Scicluna to investigate the situation in Chile.
After receiving Scicluna’s report, Francis apologized, said that he had been seriously mistaken, and asked to meet the country’s bishops and more outspoken survivors in person.
He met with Chile’s bishops May 15-17. As a result, each of them tendered letters of resignation, which Pope Francis has yet to accept or reject. The pope also gave the bishops a letter chastising them for systemic cover-up of clerical abuse and calling them to institute deep changes.
On May 31, the Vatican announced that Francis has decided to send Scicluna and Bertomeu back to Chile in the coming days, this time traveling to the Diocese of Osorno, where Barros is stationed, in order to “advance the process of healing and reparation for victims of abuse” in Chile.
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A battle made to be culturally regional by Europeans is more a convulsion of our universal human nature to a toxin detrimental to life.
Our Mystical Body envelopes a multicultural humanity, Europeans the first to receive the Gospels from Jerusalem, freed from ancestor worship, minds opened to discovery and order. At a time when Europe reached a zenith, speculation and loss of faith it degraded intellectually. Its power extended south to Africa and with it its Christian faith.
Missionaries remained the vibrant manifestation of Christ to the world Africa emerging from life in a primordial environment responded with a sense of deliverance. Despite slavery, inhuman exploitation the African spirit endured, thrived. Christ, for the African, was deliverer and model. Homosexuality had its devastating effect in the heart of Africa men subject to brutal conditions imposed by Europeans and Muslims. Disease, Aids killed many.
African prelates like Ambongo have no time for intellectually sophisticated arguments, readily perceived as affectations and hollow. Merely weak excuses for the depravity of the once noble European character. The European missionaries that taught and died to bring them the faith left them with lasting, heroic examples of the faith.
Rather than the backward African as perceived from the jaundiced vision of men like Cdls Jean-Claude Hollerich, Walter Kasper Cardinals such as Ambongo and his episcopal confreres, through the mysterious workings of the Spirit possess the vision of Christ.
Finally, a Catholic bishop who can speak out boldly against the homosexualist agenda in the Church. Maybe other bishops can find the courage to do likewise. Doubtful, but we’ll see.
A relief to hear again from Cardinal Ambongo, and may we hear more from St. Augustine’s Africa and many others. Other particular Church’s within the universal Catholic Church also rejected Fiducia Supplicans, many from Europe:
Poland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Peru, the Netherlands, Ukraine, parts of Spain and Argentina, the Coptic Church, and even the Orthodox Churches, including Metropolitan Hilarion from Budapest of the Russian Orthodox Church, who expressed “great shock when he read this document.” Very ecumenical! And then, there are still others: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-priests-scholars-ask-church-leaders-to-request-the-pope-withdraw-fiducia-supplicans/
Cardinal Mueller, the former Prefect for the Congregation (now split in two and demoted to a dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith, even addressed the question whether Cardinal Fernandez’s fanciful Fiducia Supplicans crossed the line into heresy, or not (not a formal heresy, but an enabler): https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/02/does-fiducia-supplicans-affirm-heresy
And, at least nine dioceses in France.
Romans 1:26-27
New International Version
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. 27 In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.
1 Corinthians 6:9-11
New International Version
9 Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men[a]
10 nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.
11 And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.
The fact that a Catholic cardinal affirming an ages-old teaching of the Catholic Church would be worthy of a news story shows once again…
The Bergoglio legacy lives on.
Pope Leo XIII, pray for us.
Cardinal Ambongo: “Opposition to same-sex blessings not an ‘African exception'”.
Hear, hear.
Heteropraxy, like Sfiducia Supplicans, is a form of cruelty. If our sins are blessed, then they are not forgiven but retained. “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” (John 20:23).
Unrepentant grave sin prevents union with God. Wanting to “bless” mortal sin is never loving. Sfiducia Supplicans is a form of adultery, enabling separation from Christ, the Bridegroom. In this way, Sfiducia Supplicans shares the pastoral errors of Amoralist Laetitia seeking force Communion with God to our grave sins.
It has been said that the demons drive sodomites to commit their sin. But since this sin is so heinous and repulsive, that even the demons, because of their original angelic nature, flee in revolt as the act commences.
When God does respond to our sinfulness, it will be especially brutal for these who, in their self-proclaimed pride, mocked God by flaunting this sin in His face for so long, and even worse for those within His Catholic Church who sided with them.