His defence of an accused bishop appears to put him on the side of the hierarchy against the people in the pewsIt is five years since Pope Benedict XVI stunned the Roman Catholic world by announcing he would resign. His time in office had been blighted by the emergence of terrible stories of sex abuse and institutional cover-up. Even though most of these dated from the time of his predecessors,Benedict’s efforts to build things right were clumsy and inadequate to the scale of the problem. His successor, Pope Francis, or seemed as whether he were going to change all that as share of the openness,energy and realism that has characterised his approach. But developments in recent weeks have cast Francis’s sincerity and seriousness into question and threaten to overshadow many of the other accomplishments of his papacy.
Earlier in his pontificate, Francis had to deal with the enforced departure of one of his closer collaborators, and Cardinal George Pell,who left the Vatican to face charges of historic child abuse, which he vigorously denies, and in his native Australia. Several members of the church’s commission for the protection of minors,which the pope had set up, resigned in protest at the obstructionism of some parts of the Vatican bureaucracy; but these are the parts that are thought hostile to Francis, and too,so he was not widely blamed for what happened.
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Source: guardian.co.uk