It may be years before the full extent of sexual abuse in South African Catholic institutions is known. That is according to the Bishop of Mthatha and president of the Southern African Catholic Bishops Conference (SACBC), Sithembele Sipuka.
This comes as a 43-year-old Catholic church leader is scheduled to reappear in an Eastern Cape court for sexual assault next week. The alleged sexual assault of a 19-year-old woman happened at a popular Catholic mission which also runs one of the top schools in the Eastern Cape, and occurred between August and December.
The case was reported to the police on March 4. The church leader is out on R1,000 bail and will appear in the Mount Fletcher magistrate’s court on April 12.
Bishop Sipuka, who was elected president of the SACBC in 2018, was one of hundreds of bishops who attended an unprecedented four-day summit at the Vatican in February.
The summit, called by Pope Francis, was aimed at confronting sexual abuse in the Catholic church.
Speaking to the Dispatch from the Diocese of Mthatha, Sipuka said the Vatican summit had exposed the extent of child abuse in the church.
While it was apparent that the scourge was widespread in Western nations, he believed more South African victims would come forward as the Catholic church moved away from “cover-ups” and protecting the clergy.
“One of the dynamics of sexual abuse is that abusers coerce people into silence. There is that culture of silence. The church has not looked at what is lurking beneath,” Sipuka said.
At the summit, bishops heard the testimonies of a number of victims, accounts that shocked many of those in attendance.
“The Pope called all the bishop heads together because there have been a lot of cover-ups. By not speaking out when there has been abuse, the clergy make themselves accomplices,” Sipuka said.
Sipuka and other church leaders say they are determined to stamp out this scourge through measures aimed at empowering victims to speak out and ensure their abusers are brought to justice. This is being done by way of specialised committees and prayer events, as well as the availability of outside counsellors to whom abuses can be reported.
South Africa has 26 dioceses, and 35 cases of clergy sexual abuse have been reported to the church since 2003. Compared to a country like Australia, this figure appears slight.
A four-year investigation by the Australian government found 4,444 people were abused at more than 1,000 Catholic institutions between 1980 and 2015.
But both Sipuka and Sister Hermenegild Makoro, the secretary-general of the Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference, believe more South Africans will start to report their attackers.“We must give preference to victims, and our intention is to deal with abuse at the systemic level. It is important to note that there are a few cases of false accusations, but the first priority is to give the benefit of the doubt to children who report these crimes. It takes a lot of courage for a child to do this.“To many people, a priest has an awe around him, and we need to train priests to understand their responsibilities. Unfortunately sexual abuse happens at all levels of society, but as a church, we can’t remain complacent. It does not exonerate us because it is a wide phenomenon. We are supposed to be on the high moral ground.”Makoro, who last year was reappointed by Pope Francis to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM), said at a national level, the Catholic church had a committee that oversaw protocols and guidelines for priests.“The church is calling on people to come forward if they have been abused,” Makoro told the Dispatch.“Every year we write to the various diocese asking to report if there have been any cases of abuse, and they write back. There is definitely concern in the church about the safety of the vulnerable.”Asked why the church in South Africa did not seem to experience as much abuse as countries like Australia and the US, Makoro said she could not be certain that the prevalence was less.“Some things are happening, but people don’t always see this as abuse. They see things differently. This is the same as human trafficking. Parents will see their children being offered a job somewhere as a good thing, but then the child ends up in a situation where they are trafficked. People don’t understand these things. It’s the same in the church [in terms of abuse].”The church, she said, was determined to empower people to come forward, even if they were not abused by a priest. “We now have a contact person in every diocese who can be contacted by a victim, and that person will take the complaint from there.”..