Arab News Japan

TOKYO: A Japanese Roman Catholic woman is suing the Catholic Church in Japan, saying it did not assist her after alleging that a Catholic priest had abused her.

TANAKA Tokie told a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan she was abused in her childhood and later decided to become a Catholic to try and resolve the trauma she felt from that abuse.

She told her priest about her past but, she says, he started to abuse her as well. He also took videos during the abuse and threatened to show the videos if she didn’t obey him.

In 2018, she consulted the director of the Human Rights Office of the Catholic Church and shared her experience. She was told that the priest would undergo counseling for three years.

However, she found out that the Church gave money to the priest so that he could flee the country to Chile. She later found out that he had returned to Japan and had married a Japanese woman.

Tanaka’s lawyer AKITA Kazue sent a letter to the Vatican but has received no reply. With the recent death of Pope Francis, Akita says one of the cardinals voting for a new pope is Cardinal KIKUCHI Isao, who is a member of the same Catholic group – the Society of the Divine Word – that Tanaka’s alleged abuser belongs to.

The Church in Tokyo said that it is not responsible for the private life of the priest. “Whatever happens in the private life of the priests, the Church is not responsible for it,” Akita said. “That’s the claim of the defendant. So, the Society of the Divine Word says that priests have a private life and they can freely act on their own, you know, separate from the Church’s teachings.”

Akita said she wondered if Cardinal Kikuchi had the moral authority to vote in the election of the new Pope and she noted that it was a policy of Pope Francis that suspicious cases must be reported immediately to the authorities.

“If it is reported and if nothing is done, that is meaningless,” Akita said. “I believe that Cardinal Kikuchi was in the position to know about the case, but nothing was done. It appears to me that they are not serious dealing with or responding to such a case.” She added that she had learned of other similar cases.

Tanaka remains a Catholic but appears to have little faith left. “All I can say is that I’m very sad and because the faith is very dear to me, so I feel very helpless, hopeless,” she said. “I just wanted someone to listen to my experience. I go to church every day, and I listen to sermons from the pastors, from the fathers, and they say all kinds of beautiful things. You can’t just believe the same person would do something horrible to you.”