Conversions, abuse, sexual crimes: Will Pope apologise for these when he visits India too?

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

A Goa Chronicle investigation found that between 2014 and 2019, 97 cases were registered against clergy of Christian faith in India and 7 of Indian origin outside the country in the United States and United Kingdom.

New Delhi, Aug 12: The papal apology tour in Canada has grabbed headlines. Pope Francis was on a six-day visit to Canada to apologise to the indigenous people for abuse in government schools run by the Roman Catholic Church.

During his visit in July, the Pope said that he was pained that the Catholics had supported oppressive and unjust policies against them.

Reports last year had said that the Pope is likely to visit India in 2022 or early 2023. The question is whether the Pope would offer apologies to the numerous numbers of conversions that have taken place in India. There have been multiple reports of abuse by the Church in India, especially in Goa.

While this is one point of contention, the question is whether the Pope has the moral authority to apologise for the crimes committed by anyone. We need to revisit a case reported from Argentina in 2019 when investigators raided the religious Antonio Provolo Institute for the Deaf. This was one of the worst cases against the Catholic Church in which it was found that pedophiles preyed on the most isolated and submissive children.

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An investigation by the Washington Post revealed that Church officials up to and including Pope Francis were warned repeatedly and directly about a group of predators including an Italian priest Nicola Corradi.

Later it was also found that Corradi was part of sexual crimes at a sister school in Argentina where he worked between 1970 and 1994. The alumni of a related school in Italy where Corradi had served identified him as being among a number of priests who carried out abuse over 5 decades. These schools were founded and staffed by priests from the Company of Mary for the Education of the Deaf which is a Catholic congregation that answers to the Vatican.

The victims in the Italian school sounded an alert to the authorities first in 2008. They also mailed a list to Pope Francis in 2014 and later next year handed him the list. However, it was the Argentinian authorities and not the Church that intervened and took action. The authorities even said that the Church had not fully cooperated with the investigation.

In 2021, Panchanya, an RSS-linked magazine, said that the Christian Church and its priests were indulging in widespread sexual exploitation. The magazine cited the instance of France and said that over 3 lakh children were exploited between 1950 and 2000 and 3,000 priests had been named as accused. The magazine further termed the apology by Pope France as a mere formality under pressure. It also noted that despite the apology, such incidents continued to take place.

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If one were to look at the India context cases of assault, fraud sexual assault and murder have been reported. A Goa Chronicle investigation found that between 2014 and 2019, 97 cases were registered against clergy of Christian faith in India and 7 of Indian origin outside the country in the United States and United Kingdom.

83 of the crimes committed were of sexual abuse, while 7 cases of murder had been registered against the clergy. The most number of cases reported were from Kerala (28) while Tamil Nadu (24) came second on the list.

The investigation also found that out of the 83 cases of sexual abuse, 56 were against minors between the age of 5 and 17 years. Pastor Charuk Oraon of Jharkhand was accused of raping a 5-year-old girl, the investigation found.

In the year 2018, Vatican’s former ambassador to Washington accused Pope Francis and his predecessor Pope Benedict XVI of knowingly hiding sexual abuse allegations involved a disgraced American cardinal. In his letter, Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who was papal nuncio, or ambassador, in Washington from 2011 to 2016 accused Francis of being aware and tolerating the transgressions of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop in Washington.

In 2013 when Francis became Pope he called for decisive action, but his critics say that he has not done enough to hold to account Bishops who covered up abuse. Francis had also set up a special panel to deal with these issues, but it faced setbacks with high-level resignations in 2017 who cited stumbling blocks and hindrances.

At the end of it one must ask if apologies would suffice to the heinous crimes being conducted by the Church. Also will the Pope offer apologies like he has done in so many countries when he visits India where the Church does not have exactly a good track record.