Abuse crisis ‘threatens the mission of the Church’, says Schönborn

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has said that the sexual abuse crisis is the biggest challenge facing the Church, and that it threatens its mission to preach the Gospel, writes Christa Pongratz-Lippitt.

In a 31 January interview with the German magazine, Stern, he said: “Francis has made ‘the Joy of the Gospel’ his central topic. The message these [perpetrators of abuse] are sending out is the exact opposite. If we don’t get down to reappraising the abuse, all talk of ‘the Joy of the Gospel’ will go down the plughole.”

“The Joy of the Gospel”, or Evangelii Gaudium, is the 2013 apostolic exhortation in which Francis set out the programme for his papacy.

Cardinal Schönborn was speaking ahead of the 21-24 February Vatican summit on abuse. He warned that the Church’s confrontation with clerical sexual abuse will be a long and painful process. “The main thing is not to pray but above all to act on behalf of the victims and raise awareness of abuse. Pope Francis is very wisely triggering a process towards a joint way of coping with the abuse crisis,” the cardinal said.

“The most important lesson that we … must learn from this tragedy is first and above all to feel empathy for the victims,” he said. It had been a great mistake that many churchmen had first and foremost tried to protect the Church.

In 1998, he and three other Austrian bishops had felt obliged publicly to declare that, to the best of their knowledge, the then Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Hermann Groër, was guilty of sexual abuse. In 1995 (when Groër was first accused), events “bowled us bishops over. It took far too long for us to recognise … the harsh and unadulterated truth,” Cardinal Schönborn said.

Asked if this lesson had been learned by the Vatican, the cardinal replied: “I have from time to time been able to bring in my experiences.” The encounters he had had with perpetrator priests, “many of whom still refuse to admit their guilt”, had been a great emotional burden, he said.