He also cautioned against “mixing time periods” when judging the Church’s response to abuse.
“When doing these studies we have to be careful in the interpretations that we do over long periods of time,” he commented.
“When you do it over such a long time, there is a risk of confusing the way you perceive the problem of a time period 70 years before.”
“I just want to say this as a principle: A historical situation should be interpreted with the hermeneutics of the time, not ours.”
Members of a French Catholic academy have sharply criticized the CIASE report’s methodology.
Eight representatives of the prestigious 250-member Académie catholique de France wrote a 15-page document arguing that CIASE had departed “in a troubling way” from its mandate and casting doubt on its headline figures.
The intervention prompted resignations from the group. Among those reportedly tendering their resignations were Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, president of the French bishops’ conference, and Sister Véronique Margron, president of the Conference of Religious of France (CORREF), both of whom took part in the CIASE report’s launch.
Jean-Marc Sauvé, president of CIASE, responded to the critique by defending his team’s work.
AFP reported that the pope did not refer to the critique, which has reportedly been sent to the Vatican, during his meeting with the French bishops, which lasted more than an hour.
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Moulins-Beaufort said that Pope Francis also discussed the resignation of Archbishop Michel Aupetit as archbishop of Paris, which the pope accepted on Dec. 2.
The pope indicated to journalists during his in-flight press conference that he had accepted Aupetit’s resignation because the archbishop had “lost his reputation so publicly.”
“He simply told us how sad he was about the situation and the decision he had to make,”Moulins-Beaufort said, according to the Catholic weekly magazine Famille Chrétienne.
“He repeated what he had said on the plane, namely that he had taken this decision on the altar of hypocrisy and not of truth because he felt that the climate that had been created did not allow Archbishop Aupetit to govern the diocese peacefully.”
Moulins-Beaufort, the archbishop of Reims, northeastern France, said that the pope underlined “his esteem for the pastoral activity” of Aupetit, who celebrated a farewell Mass in Paris on Dec. 10.
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