Vatican investigation of East Timor’s Belo urged by UN, abuse survivor groups
- They want Pope Francis to authorise full investigation of Catholic Church archives on three continents
- They want to know who knew what and when about alleged sexual abuse by Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, East Timor independence hero
The United Nations and advocacy groups for survivors of clergy sexual abuse are urging Pope Francis to authorise a full investigation of Catholic Church archives on three continents to ascertain who knew what and when about sexual abuse by Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the revered independence hero of East Timor.
The Vatican’s sex abuse office said last week that it had secretly sanctioned Belo in 2020, forbidding him from having contact with minors or with East Timor, based on misconduct allegations that arrived in Rome in 2019.
That was the year Francis approved a new church law that required all cases of predator prelates (high-ranking clergy) to be reported in-house and established a mechanism to investigate bishops, who had long escaped accountability for abuse or cover-up during the church’s decades-long scandal.
But a brief statement by the Vatican, issued after Dutch magazine De Groen Amsterdammer exposed the Belo scandal by quoting two of his alleged victims, did not reveal what church officials might have known before 2019.
