The Pope And South America

VATICAN

Man in the Mirror

Pope Francis took the opportunity during his annual Christmas address to give Vatican officials a tongue-lashing for their ambition and vanity, nagging issues he sees as a “cancer” within the church.

“Reforming Rome is like cleaning the Egyptian sphinxes with a toothbrush,” the pope said during his address. “You need patience, dedication and delicacy.”

Known for his commitment to reforming the Catholic Church, Francis has always spiced his Christmas greeting with bittersweet notes of the church’s ills.

But a string of recent gaffes by his Holiness has some saying that the reformer needs to take a look in the mirror.

During his trip to South America last month, the pope denounced misogyny and corruption within politics and society at large and called on the nations of Peru and Chile to bolster the rights of their indigenous communities.

However, people in both nations have criticized the church’s response to revelations of sexual abuse in prominent Catholic institutions, ABC News reported.

Before his arrival in Santiago, homemade bombs went off in three Catholic churches, complete with notes protesting Francis’ appointment of a bishop in 2015 accused of covering up wide-scale sexual abuse by a priest in the 1980s and 1990s.

Francis dove directly into the issue during the first leg of his trip in his many public addresses, but stopped short of condemning the bishop he’d elevated, telling journalists that “the day they bring me proof against Bishop Barros, then I’ll speak.” He went on to equate accusations by survivors with slander, the Associated Press wrote, sparking outrage from victims and the public.

“That is the enigma of Pope Francis,” said Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database BishopAccountability.org. “He is so bold and compassionate on many issues, but he is an old-school defensive bishop when it comes to the sex-abuse crisis.”

Francis eventually apologized for the statement, but his tour in Peru wasn’t without its hiccups, either.

During an address to some 500 cloistered nuns in Lima, Francis lobbed a joke that likened gossiping nuns to the Shining Path terrorists who fought the Peruvian state during the 1980s and 1990s, a conflict that resulted in 69,000 deaths, Reuters reported.

Critics argued that the church’s sex-abuse scandals were more akin to terror than were gossiping nuns.

The church recently took over a 20,000-member Catholic lay society based in Peru amid widespread accusations of pedophilia. But instead of being handed over to Peruvian investigators, the founder of the society was forced into exile in Rome, where he is being investigated by the church.

Such anecdotes smell of brushing scandal under the rug, but some argue that the strict political structure of the Catholic Church gives the pontiff only so much power, Simeon Tegel wrote for US News & World Report.

Even so, others say that the politically active pope is preaching hypocrisy by demanding reform without doing the legwork, Tegel wrote.

One only has to look at the numbers to see dissatisfaction with the Holy See, Tegel writes: The proportion of Latin Americans describing themselves as Catholic fell to 59 percent last year from 80 percent only two decades ago, according to one study by Chilean pollsters.

That’s a reflection of something happening in the church – and it’s certainly not reform.