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| An investigator leaving the Chilean Episcopate in Santiago after Tuesday's raid. Photograph: Dragomir Yankovic/AFP/Getty Images |
You can almost feel sorry for Pope 'Uncle Frankie' Francis as he contemplates the long, slow self-induced implosion of the institutionally corrupt and debauched Catholic Church he struggles to lead and give moral guidance too. It must be like the sale of indulgences scandals of the Late Middle Ages that nearly destroyed the church, only this time it's worse.
This time, people who leave the church in disgust at the hypocrisy and debauchery of clerics don't just have the alternative of another sect of Christianity - which anyway in its now myriad different manifestations, is suffering almost as badly as the Catholic Church from scandals almost identical to those of the Catholics. This time those turning their back on the church have a clear alternative to religion in the form of a large and growing secular humanism and non-affiliation which are now in a very clear majority in many countries in the developed world. Many are now looking not for an alternative religion but for an alternative to religion.
The impunity of the Chilean hierarchy has ended. In Chile, we’re seeing what happens when the Catholic church is treated as an ordinary corporate citizen. Prosecutors in Chile have raised the bar for civil authorities in other countries. The children of Chile will be safer, survivors more likely to find justice, and the church ultimately stronger.
And part of this growing secularisation is a loss of the deference that the church, and the Catholic Church in particular especially in Latin America, Southern Europe, parts of Africa and the Philippines and even in the USA, could once have taken for granted. With the Church's loss of moral authority had gone any political authority and influence they once had. Politicians now try to distance themselves from the Church and its clerics rather than demonstrate their closeness and support for them. The mutual support between church and state has broken down.This must have been brought home to Pope Francis this week, which must surely be one of the worst in his tenure, when the Chilean equivalent of the FBI raided one of the most important Catholic buildings in the capital, Santiago, the headquarters of the Catholic church’s Episcopal Conference, looking for evidence of sexual abuses by the Marist Brothers, a Catholic monastic order. Prosecutor Raul Guzmán has confirmed that he is investigating more than 35 accusations of abuse committed against former students at schools run by the Marists.
The Marist scandal came to light a year ago when the order admitted that Brother Abel Pérez who worked in two of the order's schools, abuse 14 minors between the 1970s and 2008. They later admitted that another brother had abused five students. Although the Marist order opened a canonical investigation and took legal action against Pérez, it later emerged that they had actually know about his activities since 2010, eight years earlier.
Additionally, Chilean abuse victims have filed complaints against three Catholic priests, a Capuchin brother and six more Marists, detailing numerous instances of abuse.
This, in addition to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report detailing over 1000 cases of abuse by 300 Catholic Priests in Pennsylvania alone, and the final sentencing of the most senior Catholic cleric, Cardinal Wilson, to be convicted of a crime related to child abuse (albeit to a sentence of having to live with his sister for six months!) must make grim reading for Pope Francis.
Earlier this year all 34 of Chile's bishops tendered their resignation to Pope Francis following a devastating report by the team under Archbishop Charles Scicluna sent in to investigate allegations against Bishop Juan Barros, who was accused by victims of witnessing their abuse and ignoring it, as well as allegations of abuse involving the Marist Brothers, Salesian and Franciscan orders.
So far, Pope Francis has formally accepted five of these resignations.
The impression is of a noose tightening around the neck of the world-wide Catholic Church that is going to end in a mass resignation and purge of very many of its senior clerics - if the current Pope is serious about putting a stop to these abuses and coverups. The problem then will be how to find replacements from amongst those who have not either abused minors themselves, or been aware of abuses and at best looked the other way and at worst were complicit in it.
The stench of corruption pervades the Catholic Church, just as it did in the Middle Ages.
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