On the first day of a long overdue summit, Pope Francis offered 21 proposals to combat clergy sex abuse, from preparing a handbook for bishops on how to handle sex abuse cases to creating guidelines to prevent predator priests from shuffling around.
But the pope’s proposals rang hollow and came far too late for Alexa MacPherson, who was sexually abused by a Dorchester priest from the time she was 3 years old until age 9.
“It just feels like smoke and mirrors,” Alexa told me. “It just doesn’t feel like anything will really ever come to fruition with it.”
The pope made his proposals Thursday, the first day of a four-day summit to prevent child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. Nearly 200 church leaders, including Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley, gathered at the Vatican.
One suggestion that angered Alexa was the “right to defense,” where the names of accused pedophile priests wouldn’t be released to the public until an investigation is complete. “That really just angers me,” Alexa said. “Why should they be able to be hidden away?”
Alexa, now a mother of two, said the summit should have taken place years ago. The pope’s proposed measures, Alexa said, look good on paper but don’t mean anything if the church doesn’t follow through with them.
And why, Alexa asked, do bishops need a booklet on how to handle child sex abuse cases? Why isn’t it just common sense, she asked, to report somebody who commits an atrocious crime to the police?
Church leaders heard heart-rending, videotaped testimony from five survivors of clergy sex abuse from around the world.
A woman from Africa described how a Catholic priest began raping her when she was 15. She became pregnant three times, she said, according to The Associated Press, and the priest forced her to have three abortions.
“He gave me everything I wanted when I accepted to have sex; otherwise he would beat me,” she said. “I got pregnant three times and he made me have an abortion three times, quite simply because he did not want to use condoms or contraceptives.”
Alexa says the church needs to adopt a “zero-tolerance policy and be 100 percent transparent and accountable.”
She’s not hopeful.
“They’ve already said,” Alexa told me, “that there’s no way they’re adopting a zero-tolerance policy.”
