LIMA, Peru (AP) – Pope Francis ventured into the Amazon to demand rights for indigenous groups, decried the scourge of corruption afflicting the region’s politics and denounced a culture of “machismo” in which violence against women is too often tolerated.
Yet his latest visit to South America is likely to be remembered most for 27 dismissive words that sparked outrage among Chileans already angry over a notorious clerical abuse scandal and haunted the rest of his trip.
“That is the enigma of Pope Francis,” Anne Barrett Doyle of the online abuse database BishopAccountability.org said Sunday. “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.”
Even before Francis landed in Chile for the first leg of his two-country trip, the pontiff’s visit seemed ripe for contention. Vandals fire-bombed three churches in the capital of Santiago, warning in a leaflet that “the next bombs will be in your cassock,” and an angry group protesting the high cost of hosting him briefly occupied the Nunciature where he would sleep.
Also looming over his visit to both Chile and Peru were damaging clerical sex abuse scandals and growing apathy over the Catholic Church. In a Latinobarometro annual poll last year, 45 percent of Chileans identified as Roman Catholic, a sharp drop from the mid-60s a decade ago. Even in deeply religious Peru, where nearly three-quarters of the population calls itself Catholic, the number of faithful has dipped notably from a generation ago.