VATICAN CITY
The Vatican team of investigators who exposed wide-scale priestly sexual abuse and a cover-up in Chile's Catholic Church is going back to the country on a pastoral mission to the divided diocese of Osorno.
Vatican spokesman Greg Burke said Thursday the visit to Osorno by Archbishop Charles Scicluna and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu wasn't investigative in nature but pastoral, part of Pope Francis' effort to help Chile heal from the scandal.
Osorno has been badly divided ever since Francis in 2015 tapped Bishop Juan Barros to lead the diocese over the objections of some of Chile's other bishops. Barros had been a top lieutenant of Chile's most notorious predator priest, the Rev. Fernando Karadima, and had been accused by Karadima's victims of having witnessed and ignored their abuse.
Barros denied the charge, but he was one of the 30-plus Chilean bishops who recently submitted their resignations to the pope after Scicluna and Bertomeu issued a 2,300-page report detailing decades of abuse and cover-up in the Chilean church.
Francis had initially sent the pair to Chile in February to take testimony from victims and witnesses, after drawing widespread public condemnation for having defended Barros during a trip to Chile. Among the 64 people Scicluna and Bertomeu interviewed were members of a delegation from Osorno, which is some 900 kilometers (560 miles) from Santiago.
Among other complaints, Osorno's lay Catholics have argued that Barros can't be trusted to protect children from pedophiles in Osorno today if he claims to have never seen any abuse when it was all around him in Karadima's community.
Barros' March 2015 installation Mass in Osorno's cathedral was marred by violent protests by some of the hundreds of local Catholics who have continued to reject him as their bishop, staging regular protests that have divided friends and even families.
Critics have since accused Barros of heavy-handed management in the diocese that amounted to an abuse of power.
Juan Carlos Claret, a spokesman for a group of lay Catholics in Osorno, said the proposed visit by Scicluna and Bertomeu was "the least we could hope for," given that the pope himself was responsible for Osorno's problems. He recalled that Francis appointed Barros in the first place over the objections of Osorno faithful and some of Chile's bishops, and then kept him there despite three years of protests.
"We appreciate the gesture, but we don't know why they're coming," Claret said.
A Vatican statement said the Scicluna-Bertomeu mission to Osorno, expected in the coming days, had as its aim "to advance the process of reparation and healing of abuse victims."
The trip is expected after Francis receives another group of Karadima victims at the Vatican this weekend. Late last month, Francis spent four days with Karadima's main accusers.
Over the past three years, Barros twice offered to resign but Francis twice refused to accept it, blaming the opposition to him on "stupid" ''leftists" in Osorno.
That attitude has left a bitter taste among many faithful in Osorno, who blame the pope more than Chile's bishops for their problems. Francis to date hasn't explained why he appointed Barros to Osorno even though the leadership of Chile's bishops' conference had proposed that Barros and other Karadima-trained bishops resign and take a year sabbatical to calm the waters after the Karadima scandal broke.
Francis has admitted he made "grave errors in judgment" in the Barros case, but he blamed his missteps on a "lack of truthful and balanced information" that reached him. He hasn't revealed who provided him with the bad information or why he decided to overrule the will of Chile's bishops, Osorno's faithful and even members of his own sex abuse advisory commission who objected to the appointment.
A key figure is the Rev. German Arana, a Spanish Jesuit who is close to Francis and Barros. In 2016, a group of Jesuits in Osorno wrote a letter to their superior complaining about Arana's presence in the diocese as Barros' supporter, saying he dismissed the opposition to Barros and "treated us like children," according to the text published by Chile's La Tercera newspaper.
The pope is widely expected to accept Barros' resignation the third time around, along with the other Karadima-trained bishops and an unknown number of other diocesan bishops.
Presumably, after meeting with Osorno's Catholic community, Scicluna and Bertomeu will be able to report back to Francis on the pastoral needs of the diocese and the profile of a new bishop.
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