CHALLENGES FOR THE PORTUGUESE CATHOLIC CHURCH
I fear that the impact of the report on the sexual violence to which thousands of young people and children have been subjected by members of the Catholic hierarchy will be another victim of the power system that feeds those vile practices. The worst thing that can happen is that the report will be read only as the portrayal of individual expressions of a deformed sexuality. Of course, the least that the Church - as the institution in which the abuses gained the dimension of an installed culture - has to do is to recognize itself as the institution under the cover of which the perpetrators of these crimes felt protected to practice them repeatedly. And, accordingly, it must provide the victims with all the means to heal the deep wounds that have been inflicted on their lives. But the impact of the report must go far beyond this minimum, it must be more extensive, otherwise it will not serve to combat the sordid violence of which its testimonies reveal.
This violence has the physical and psychological expressions that are known. But, giving strength and meaning to this violence, there is a deeper violence that is that of a power system that has legitimized itself based on the arrogance of the claim of a representation of divinity, operating a hierarchical distinction between believers and the caste of ministers of the divine. Beyond the reparation for the victims, the first great challenge that the report throws at the Church is, therefore, to be an instrument to combat the structural violence inherent in what Francis has courageously called the sin of clericalism.
And then there is an omission in the report: Portuguese society has coexisted with the practices of sexual violence within the Church and has tolerated them between whispers and looking away. If the Church is the direct target of this report's denunciations, the silences of Portuguese society and its instituted powers are its indirect target. As a portrait of a society that lives well with (or even cultivates) the abuse of the weakest, the report must be used as a tool to denounce the wide gap between official discourse and concrete practice regarding respect for the dignity of the most vulnerable.
Professor at FEUC, CES researcher and member of the John XXIII Christian Welcoming Community