The Vatican has once again postponed a meeting between Pope Francis and the head of CIASE, the independent commission on sexual abuse in the French Church, according to the Catholic weekly Famille Chrétienne.
Jean-Marc Sauvé, the retired civil servant who oversaw the blockbuster abuse report issued last October, was first due to meet Francis in early December. The audience was postponed after criticism of the report’s methodology by conservative Catholics in France.
Sauvé, whose report was endorsed by the bishops’ conference, issued a point-by-point rebuttal that was widely accepted here, except from the most outspoken critics who seem to have rallied allies in the Curia to their cause.
The meeting has been left in doubt since then, with references to the Pope’s busy schedule, and French media have been asking why it has been so delayed.
Much of the public criticism of the report involves the methodology it used to arrive at an estimate of up to 330,000 cases of abuse, two-thirds by clerics, in the French Church since 1950.
Sauvé and several academics responded firmly that using estimates by a respected polling institute gave a truer overall picture of the abuse scandal than counting only documented cases reported to Church and secular officials.
This view was seconded by the French bishops and by Fr Hans Zollner S.J., one of the Vatican’s top experts on sexual abuse. But Pope Francis has said such studies have to be handled with caution.
Another problem is that the bishops’ conference supported the report’s argument that some Church teachings on theology, ecclesiology
and sexual morality have encouraged abuse and should be changed. This apparently raised hackles in Rome.
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