Fr. Beer and Fr. Zollner Publish Article on Safeguarding in Civiltà Cattolica
June 21, 2024, Msgr. Peter Beer, IADC Head of Research and Development, and Fr. Hans Zollner, IADC Director, published an article in Civiltà Cattolica – Italy’s oldest cultural magazine, written only by Jesuits, since 1850 – entitled, Safeguarding. The Complex Relationship between Prophecy and the Church. It proposes main features of what can be understood as safety and safeguarding, including “Safety and Safeguarding as a Challenge of Networking, as a Two-way Exchange, and as a Universal Anthropological Theme.”
The two professors hold that “safeguarding is not understood as defense, but as protection from the perspective of an empowered self and a promotion of resilience that strengthens individuals and groups, such as parish communities.” They also assert that “social structures that until recently were considered reliable, such as political parties or the Church itself, are being challenged and in some cases their alarming fragility is being exposed.”
The article concludes: “Safeguarding as a prophetic work of the Church … can succeed only if it is understood as a common task of all those who live and work together in different social structures. … Transparency, compliance and accountability are the cornerstones of the fight against abuses of power of all kinds. Transparency, compliance and accountability curb power without crippling it, not by leaving it at the mercy of the fallibility inherent in every human being, but by relating it to the community of those over whom this power is exercised. Many cases of abuse that have occurred in the Church’s area of responsibility and related cover-ups could have been avoided if these three principles had been applied more firmly.”
If you are interested in reading the full article (open access), here are the links:
Spanish: https://www.laciviltacattolica.es/2024/05/31/safeguarding/