VATICAN CITY – Pope Francis on Wednesday appointed a Chilean survivor of clerical sexual abuse to serve on a Vatican commission that advises the pontiff on how to protect children from pedophile priests.
The Vatican said that Juan Carlos Cruz is the last member of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors. Other members of the panel include a bishop, priests, nuns and lay experts.
Cruz and other survivors of a prominent Chilean predatory priest were invited by the pope in 2018 to discuss their cases with him.
In this April 24, 2018 archive photo, Chile’s surviving sexual abuse cleric and victim defender Juan Carlos Cruz is interviewed by The Associated Press in front of Vatican’s St. Peter’s Square in Rome. (AP Photo / Andrew Medichini, archive)
Decades of sexual abuse scandals in many countries, including allegations that Church officials covered up transgressions by priests, undermined the Catholic Church’s credibility among the faithful.
Cruz was the main whistleblower on clerical abuse and cover-up in his homeland, one of the most visible sexual abuse scandals.
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He is a survivor of the abuse of Chilean priest Fernando Karadima, a charismatic preacher who was ousted by the pope in 2018. The Vatican said that Francis inflicted this punishment “for the good of the Church”.
During Pope Benedict XVI’s papacy, Karadima was sanctioned a lifetime of penance and prayer for sexually abusing minors in a parish in Santiago, Chile.
Cruz helped lead the search for justice for those who were abused and for a reform of the Chilean church hierarchy.
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He said he told Francisco how Chilean bishops used Cruz’s sexual orientation to try to discredit him. Cruz, a gay man, said he told the pontiff about the pain these personal attacks caused him.
Francisco’s initial defense of one of Kardima’s protégés, Chilean bishop Juan Barros, against accusations that he witnessed and ignored Karadima’s abuse, outraged the survivors and their supporters.
But Francisco finally ordered an investigation by the Vatican that revealed decades of abuse and cover-ups by the Chilean Church’s leadership. Francis apologized for the abuse survivors, inviting Cruz and two other whistleblowers to come to the Vatican for several days of conversations with him.
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If the Vatican can convince the faithful that it is sincerely committed to stopping pedophile priests and a widespread culture of cover-ups by high-ranking clergy is crucial to sustaining the declining confidence of ordinary Catholics.
In 2017, frustrated by what she described as the Vatican’s barrier, an Irish woman, Marie Collins, who was sexually abused by a priest when she was a teenager, left her post at the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
Collins was blunt in his criticism of the Vatican offices, saying that some officials had refused the pope’s instructions to respond to all correspondence from the survivors of the abuses.
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Last year, a long-awaited Vatican report on Theodore McCarrick, an influential U.S. cardinal deposed by Francis after reports of sexual abuse, made it clear that the Holy See needs to rethink how the Church protects the faithful from bishops and other exercising hierarchies authority with often meager responsibility.