Now an initiative is being launched, with the support of Cardinal Reinhard Marx, Archbishop of Munich and Freising, taking a fresh pastoral approach to the welfare of survivors

"You took away my faith";
"The Church cheated me out of my relationship with God";
"When I needed the Church, it was not there for me!"

Time and again, we hear these cries from the victims of sexual abuse.

They point to the pastoral and spiritual failure at the heart of this crisis.

Many of the survivors of abuse are members of the People of God; their suffering is a deep wound in the Body of Christ. Saying "sorry" is not enough.

There must be a fundamental change.

It is now time for the Church to walk together alongside victims, to listen to them and to learn from them, and to serve and support them in their search for healing, wherever that might take them.

Anyone listening to survivors will often hear how badly sexual violence by a priest or other church figure can damage their relationship with God, or destroy it completely, and how they have felt completely abandoned by the Church when they have tried to understand and deal with the spiritual consequences of the abuse they have suffered.

Despite all the public and private apologies, the compensation paid to victims, the implementation of prevention and training programmes, the creation of safeguarding structures, and the commissioning of scientific studies into the root causes of abuse, it is clear that the Church is still failing survivors at this fundamental, spiritual level.

At present - when it does not avoid offering support altogether - the Church tends to ­delegate dealing with the effects of abuse to psychiatrists and canon lawyers, to internal Church specialists or external professional experts.

Caring for the victims of abuse has become the responsibility of a small and increasingly specialised group of people, who operate largely on the periphery of Church activities.

The pastoral care of the wounded and abandoned is often outsourced.

All this and much more is absolutely necessary - this professional and clinical work must be sustained, particularly the support of victims through counselling and psychotherapy.

But we can no longer keep abuse in the Church at a clinical distance.

As the Archbishop of Brisbane, Mark Coleridge, said during the abuse summit at the Vatican last year, the Church needs a "Copernican revolution" in how it deals with the survivors of abuse.

"Those who have been abused do not revolve around the Church," he said, "but the Church [revolves] around them."

The Church must face up to abuse and its effects not at its peripheries but where it hurts, at its heart.

It is there, in the pastoral and spiritual arena, where it claims the greatest competence, that it has failed the most. It is time the Church began to respond to the ­spiritual wounds caused by abuse in the ­spiritual setting where the abuse occurred.

The pastoral care of those who are suffering is at the heart of the Church's mission.

Its obligation to offer spiritual help to victims does not become obsolete because the suffering took place within the Church, or because of its failures in the past to deal with abusive priests or to listen to the voices of survivors.

Whenever victims of abuse seek spiritual support and guidance, the Church must not turn its back.

It must act with humility and sensitivity.

There has often been rejection, intrusive questioning, accusations, obfuscations and delays in the past.

For understandable reasons, many survivors have no interest in seeking therapeutic or spiritual help from the institution that has abused them.

When victims do seek to engage with the Church, they must be met with appreciation and respect, and regarded as equals.

Two fundamental principles should underpin the Church's approach. Continue reading

• Peter Beer and Hans Zollner.

These few words express the horror of abuse, especially the sexual abuse of minors in the Church. They show how much the Church's attitude and that of her leaders needs to change.

An especially poignant, religious-spiritual factor comes into play when the perpetrator is a man of the Church.

When someone is abused by a biological father, there is always someone to turn to for help, namely, God.

But when a priest commits abuse, that is someone who by his very office represents God and is referred to theologically as an alter Christus, then the victim's image of God is obscured and he or she can quickly fall into a dismally dark abyss of loneliness.

Of course, this is not limited to cases where the abuser is a man of the Church but when it does involve a priest it takes on a dimension that is qualitatively different and serious, especially in those for whom faith, liturgy and a relationship with God are important realities.

For many this results in a compromised or completely broken life of faith and lack of trust in God.

The victims: their perspective and their suffering

Those who have been subjected to unspeakable suffering by representatives of the Church and who report the crime and wish to be heard are too frequently simply turned away or reprimanded for being troublemakers who would do better to keep their mouths shut.

This can also lead to serious spiritual trauma over and above the psychological and physical trauma of abuse.

Yet the incredible burden this entails is not clear to everyone in the Church, even to those in positions of responsibility.

One would presume that those whose mission it is to preach the Gospel would understand better than anyone the extent to which some events - in this case, one causing extreme trauma - can weigh upon the core of a believer's spirituality.

And yet it is surprising how rarely this is the case.

This might also help to explain why some bishops and religious superiors pay greater attention to the political, legal and psychological implications of sexual abuse than the spiritual and theological aspects.

So it comes as no surprise that victims often view the Church's way of reacting to accusations of abuse as if she were an institution concerned only with herself rather than acting as "a loving mother" (significantly, Pope Francis uses these very words to begin his motu proprio by which he admonishes bishops and religious superiors to assume greater responsibility for uncovering and preventing abuse). Continue reading

• Hans Zollner is a professor of Psychology and the president of the Centre for Child Protection at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He is a member of Pope Francis' Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

Father Zollner is both President of the Centre for Child Protection of the Pontifical Gregorian University and a member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.

He says the detailed report about allegations of sexual molestation, violence and other abuses at the Regensburger Domspatzen school are an "important step forward".

Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI's brother Georg Ratzinger was in charge of the famous Regensburger Domspatzen choir, which was run separately from the school.

The report "Hinsehen, Zuhoren, Antworten" (Look, Listen, Respond) shows Regensburg's Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer has taken all the allegations seriously and "did not shy away from all that would ensue." Zollner says.

"We must look at reality in the face and we must address all the injustices, sins, crimes that were committed by priests and also other employees of the Church."

The report details abuses alleged to have occurred between 1945 to the early 1990's. It says at least 547 pupils have disclosed various forms of abuse; of these, 67 have disclosed instances of sexual abuse.

It took two years for the lawyer Voderholzer tasked with investigating the allegations to complete these and compile his report.

Voderholzer gave Weber free access to files and enabled him to contact victims and other people involved.

Zollner says the result is "a very well done Report and unobjectionable in its vastness, in its profundity and also in its scientific merit."

Source

• Vatican Radio
• Zenit
• DW
• Image: Regensburg Tourismus GmbH

In an interview on Vatican Radio Fr Hans Zoller said that at its most recent meeting the commission "discussed membership issues; we want to add some members especially from those areas that are not represented now, Africa, Asia, Oceania."

Jesuit Fr Hans Zollner is a psychology professor at Rome's Gregorian University and heads its Centre for the Protection of Minors.

He also serves as a member of the recently established Vatican Commission on safeguarding and care of abuse victims.

Oceania includes the dioceses of Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, and the Pacific Island nations.

In a press release Cardinal Sean O'Malley said global representation is particularly important "because in some people's minds, (they say) 'oh this is an American problem,' (or) 'this is an Irish problem.' No: this is a human problem and the Church needs to face it everywhere in the world."

O'Malley is another of eight members chosen by Pope Francis to serve on the commission, which was established on March 22.

Source

• Vatican Radio
• CNA
• Image: Vatican Radio