The election of Pope
Francis, in 2013, had the effect, among other things, of displacing the
painful story of priestly sexual abuse that had dominated public
awareness of the Church during much of the eight-year papacy of his
predecessor. The sense that the Church, both during the last years of
Benedict and under Francis, had begun to deal more forcefully with the
issue created a desire in many, inside and outside the Church, to move
on. But recent events suggest that we take another careful look at this
chapter of Church history before turning the page.
During
the past week, a German lawyer charged with investigating the abuse of
minors in a famous Catholic boys’ choir in Bavaria revealed that two
hundred and thirty-one children had been victimized over a period of
decades. The attorney, Ulrich Weber, who was commissioned by the Diocese
of Regensburg to conduct the inquiry, said that there were fifty
credible cases of sexual abuse, along with a larger number of cases of
other forms of physical abuse, from beatings to food deprivation.
