Pope Leon is committed to eliminating sexual or other abuse within the Roman Catholic Church
Pope Leon XIV said on Friday, June 20, that the Roman Catholic Church “should not tolerate any form of abuse”, Sexually or other.
Pope Leon XIV/Photo: Shutterstock
According to The Guardian, the statements were made on the occasion of representing a play that dramatize the work of a journalist who was harassed while investigating abuse scandals within a powerful Catholic group.
Robert Prevost, the Sovereign Pontiff, claimed that it is necessary to root “In the whole Church a culture of prevention that does not tolerate any form of abuse: abuse of power or authority, consciousness or spirituality, sexual abuse.”
Leon also pleaded for the importance of a free and independent press, stating that “Wherever a journalist is silent, the democratic soul of a nation is weakened. The defense of free and ethical journalism is not only an act of justice, but a debt for all those who aspire to a strong and participatory democracy. ”
The comments of the pontiff contrasts strongly with those of other bishops, including from the US, Leon's native country, which criticized the media for reports on the scandal of sexual abuse and dislocation within the church clergy, which has victimized countless children from all over the world.
Pope Leon, accused of overlooking charges of sexual abuse
They also come after the survivors groups of sexual abuses from the clergy expressed their concern about the choice of Leon, on May 8, as successor to the late Pope Francis, at the head of the nearly 1.5 billion Catholics worldwide.
These concerns appeared in part from the moment Robert Prevost was leading the US branch of the Augustinian religious order.
In 2000, that subsidiary distributed a priest Augustinian named James Ray in a monastery near an elementary school, nine after the clergy had been forbidden to work around the children due to the accusations that he had moved minors.
Then, after becoming a bishop of Chiclayo, Peru, starting in 2015, three women directly told Prevost that they had been abused during the minority by two local priests-but the accusers said they did not have a significant investigation on their claims.
The Vatican said that Prevost was not the official who authorized Ray's accommodation at the Chicago Monastery, Leon's hometown.
Regarding the case in Chicalayo, the Church officials said that Leon treated the case in accordance with the canonical norms, but that the Vatican agency investigating the clerical sex abuse has not found sufficient evidence to support the accusations of the accusrators.
Leon himself did not discuss the cases of sexual mussels from the Catholic clergy until the representation of Friday of Proyetic Ugaz in Lima, Peru.
Francis took the extraordinary measure to dissolve Sodalitium in January, about three months before his death.
According to the Associated Press, the survivors of the abuses committed by Sodalitium attribute to Leon the merit of having arranged a crucial meeting with his predecessor, who initiated an investigation by the Vatican that led to the dissolution of the organization.
As mentioned in the statement of Leon, Ugaz and her colleagues carried out their activity with “courage, patience and commitment to the truth.”
