Monday, May 5, 2025 -Two top contenders to replace Pope Francis have been reportedly accused of mishandling child s£xual abuse claims.
Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Filipino Cardinal Luis
Antonio Tagle cannot be trusted to protect children from abuse, according to a
campaign group.
The American watchdog Bishop Accountability claims the pair
withheld incriminating church records, making them unfit to tackle the issue,
which is one of the top challenges facing the Catholic Church today.
Cardinals will travel from across the globe to vote for the
next pontiff in the conclave starting on Wednesday.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of Bishop
Accountability, spoke to a press conference just outside the Vatican walls on
Friday.
She said: 'If Cardinal Parolin becomes pope, we will have a
consummate secret-keeper running the Catholic Church, and I think any hope of
transparency around sex abuse will be dashed completely.'
'No church official in the world has withheld as many
documents about abuse to civil authorities as Cardinal Parolin,' added Doyle,
whose group tracks information on such cases.
She argued that all requests for information about priests
from other countries who were accused of abuse have gone through Parolin's
office since 2013, while he has been the Vatican's secretary of state, and were
often blocked.
Doyle cited numerous examples of 'obstruction of justice'
around the world, including Chile, Britain, and Poland, for which she called
Parolin ultimately responsible.
In one example, a four-year investigation begun in 2013 by a
royal commission in Australia counted 4,400 abused children and 1,100
clerics.
She said that when asked for documents, the Vatican produced
files on just two priests.
When a British abuse commission asked in 2018 and 2019 for
information about cases in the English Benedictine Congregation, 'Cardinal
Parolin refused, saying that the Holy See [the central governing body of the
Church] did not exercise jurisdiction over individuals and institutions outside
the Vatican', Doyle said.
Doyle then discussed the group's findings on Tagle, the
former Archbishop of Manila.
She accused him of doing nothing to pull the church in
the Philippines out of the 'dark ages' of abuse. She noted that guidelines
dealing with sexual abuse cases have not been published on the webpages of the
Manila archdiocese nor the bishops'.
'If Cardinal Tagle cannot even get his brother bishops
from his home country to publish guidelines, what on earth can we expect for
him to achieve as pope of a global church?' asked Doyle.
On Saturday evening the Philippines' governing body of
Catholic bishops issued a rare statement on clerical sexual
abuse, defending Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle on the issue days before the
process to elect a new pope gets underway.
The statement reads: 'Addressing allegations of
misconduct by clergy rests with the respective diocesan bishops or religious
superiors' and not with Tagle.
'Since his appointment to a full-time position in the
Roman Curia, Cardinal Tagle no longer holds direct authority over any diocese
in the Philippines.'
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