Child abuse survivor on Catholic mandatory celibacy

This 24 February 2019 video says about itself:

Pope blames clergy abuse on ‘Satan’ as activists dismiss his speech a ‘PR stunt’

Pope Francis has described the child sexual abuse scandal engulfing the Catholic church as ‘the work of the devil’ and offending priests ‘the tools of Satan’. Speaking at a mass marking the end of a four-day summit on the protection of minors, the pope said awareness is growing within the church to ensure disciplinary measures are in place to tackle sexual abuse and vowed to protect children from the ‘ravenous wolves’.

But activists and sexual abuse survivors have been angered at the pope’s failure to offer a concrete action plan to hold bishops accountable. ‘Why don’t they start with something concrete like removing the bishops who cover up’, said clergy sexual abuse victim Alessandro Battaglia.

Translated from Dutch NOS TV, 24 February 2019:

Abuse victim: ‘Not questioning celibacy is missed opportunity’

For three days, the eyes of the international press were focused on Vatican City. Under the leadership of Pope Francis, 190 participants, including 140 bishops, gathered from all over the world for what was also called the ‘abuse summit’.

Abuse victim Frans Schaars did not miss any news about the conference from his living room in Didam. …

“The Vatican is concerned about the damage that the church has suffered and not about the victims“, ​​he says.

Although the Pope talked strongly on the perpetrators of sexual abuse, the announced measures are seen as not that concrete.

Celibacy

Schaars also would have preferred a different outcome. “The discussion about celibacy was very emphatically not stimulated at the conference, while in my opinion celibacy is one of the reasons that there is and has been so much abuse.”

Schaars was sexually abused in the nineteen sixties [starting when he was 11 years old] by two fathers from a Catholic boys’ boarding school in ‘s-Heerenberg. He calls them pedophile monks. With one of them he regularly had to go to the office. It started with viewing pornographic images in an atlas owned by the father. Schaars did not know what was happening to him. “I did not know what gay people were, I did not know what sex was, nor how children were made, I was as green as grass”, he says.

Disappointed about the summit in Vatican City, he is not. “Because I did not expect much.” But that there was no explicit talk about celibacy Schaars calls a “missed opportunity”. …

Schaars thinks that the church is mainly focused on self-preservation and has too little regard for victims. “If you add up all the points, you’ll see that they want to prevent the church from getting even more damaged. It is not about the damage caused to the victims. They ask God for forgiveness, but not the abused people themselves.”