SPRINGFIELD — Holy Name Church will have Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Monday, March 11, as part of Bishop Mitchell Rozanski’s Diocesan Day of Prayer for Healing and Reconciliation.
In a Jan. 15 letter to parishes in the Springfield Roman Catholic diocese that covers all four counties of Western Massachusetts, Rozanski asked all churches to remain open on the first Monday in Lent as part of diocesan-wide efforts addressing the clergy sexual abuse crisis through “prayer and dialogue.”
Reminders have run in some parish bulletins and on websites, like that of Holy Name, and the diocese has explained the all-day hours, usually reserved only for observances in most parishes like Good Friday, as enabling “parishioners to come to offer private prayers for victims of clergy abuse, their families and loved ones.”
The healing day is part of other recent efforts the diocesan has undertaken in the wake of national and global events that have highlighted how the Church’s decades old abuse crisis continues to deepen and evolve and have ignited concerns in dioceses that did take early steps to address the issue.
A report published in early February at Rozanski’s request in the diocesan magazine, The Catholic Mirror, to address how the diocese has responded to the clergy abuse crisis showed some 15 reports were made in 2018 and in a subsequent interview Rozanski said three more have been made since January.
Rozanski stressed that "none involves any allegation of current abuse and that “all will be fully investigated.”
The report prompted Hampden District Attorney Anthony D. Gulluni to establish a hotline out of his office for “victims to report directly to law enforcement any allegations of any sexual crimes committed by a member of the clergy in Hampden County.”
The published report in the Catholic Mirror and on the diocese’s website notes the diocese has had an independent board that reviews abuse allegations since 1994, that the majority of the abuse occurred prior to this century and that cases are reported to the “relevant district attorney.”
The report also shows that to date the Springfield diocese has paid out $14.9 million in settling 147 claims since 1992.
It also shows the diocese has paid $2.25 million for therapy and counseling for victims of abuse with more than $150,000 paid in 2018.
Other recent initiatives undertaken by Rozanski, who was installed as bishop here in 2014, include a series of “listening and dialogue” to address parishioners’ concerns about clergy sex abuse cases.
The two remaining sessions will be held Monday, March 18, at St. Mary Church, Westfield, from 7 to 8:30 p.m., and Sunday, March 24, at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church, Northampton, from 6 to 7:30 p.m.
On Sunday, April 7 at 2 p.m., there will be prayer services at St. Michael’s Cathedral and at St. Joseph Church in Pittsfield.
The Vatican’s recent summit gathering abuse survivors and bishops from around the world to address the issue ended with both reactions of praise for its historic nature and disappointment in concrete accomplishments.
The summit was held in the wake of a Pennsylvania 18-month grand jury report that revealed some 300 priests in six dioceses had sexually abused 1,000 children over seven decades and that the cases were covered up by church hierarchy.
It also occurred just as former U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was removed from priesthood after a Vatican tribunal found him guilty of sexual abuse.
On Thursday, March 7, French Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, archbishop of Lyon, was found guilty by a French tribunal of failing to report to authorities the alleged sexual abuse of a priest in his diocese, given a six-month suspended prison sentence ,and announced that he will resign as archbishop.
Cardinal George Pell will be sentenced Wednesday, March 13, in Australia for an abuse conviction handed down by a Melbourne court in December. He is the highest-ranked Catholic clergyman to be found guilty of child sexual abuse to date by a criminal court.
Speaking this week in Rome to a gathering of priests there, Pope Francis, according to the Catholic News Agency, said, “Sin disfigures us, and we experience with pain the humiliating experience of when we ourselves or one of our brother priests or bishops falls into the bottomless pits of vice, corruption or, worse still, of the crime that destroys the lives of others."
He reportedly told them he feels with them “the unbearable pain and suffering that the wave of scandals – which the whole world’s newspapers are now full of – causes in us and in the whole ecclesial body.”