Megan Specia

The Vienna-based organization provided few details but said the agency’s flags would be lowered to half-staff to honor Amano, who led the group for nearly a decade and was appointed in 2017 to a third four-year term.

Amano led the agency, a United Nations group commonly known by its initials, IAEA, during a critical period in which it was responsible for overseeing Iran’s nuclear activities under the agreement reached in 2015. The United States abandoned the accord last year, and Iran has slowly been falling out of compliance with it in recent weeks.

The agency’s statement appeared to confirm reports from earlier this month that Amano would be stepping down from his position because of an unspecified illness. It included a message that Amano had intended to share in his letter to the organization’s governing board.

“During the past decade, the agency delivered concrete results to achieve the objective of ‘atoms for peace and development,’ thanks to the support of member states and the dedication of agency staff,” he wrote. “I am very proud of our achievements, and grateful to member states and agency staff.”

Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, said on Twitter on Monday that he had worked closely with Amano, who oversaw the monitoring of Iranian nuclear energy development after the 2015 nuclear deal was signed.

“I commend his skillful &amp; professional performance,” as the head of the agency, Aragchi wrote on Twitter.

John Bolton, President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, said in a statement that Amano’s death was a “great loss for Japan, the United States, and to many, many people from around the world.”

Bolton made his remarks during a visit to Japan, where he was expected to meet with officials and discuss U.S. tensions with Iran.

“His commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and his championing of peaceful nuclear energy have been unparalleled,” Bolton said of Amano. “I was proud to call Yukiya a friend and colleague. He will be sorely missed.”

Karin Kneissl, a former foreign minister of Austria, said that while many people within the IAEA had made it possible for the agency to play a role in monitoring Iran’s compliance to the 2015 nuclear deal, Amano’s discreet and diligent approach had been crucial in the current climate of animosity between Washington and Tehran.

“Mr. Amano’s role — I would say particularly ever since the United States withdrew in 2018 — was his sober and professional handling of the whole issue,” she said.

With the agency acting as “the guardian of this agreement,” as she put it, maintaining a technical approach rather than getting involved in the politics of the matter was key.

“He was not just a man of the office, he always went out and in that way he was different from his predecessors,” she noted. “As the director general, you carry the final responsibility, and it’s not an easy task because you are under scrutiny.”

Amano graduated from the Tokyo University Faculty of Law in 1972. He was the first Asian to lead the IAEA, ascending to that position after serving in the Japanese Foreign Ministry for more than three decades in a variety of roles.

Ichiro Fujisaki, a former Japanese ambassador to the United States who began his career at the Foreign Ministry four years before Amano, remembered him as “eager to learn everything,” as well as “outgoing and a wonderful man to work with.”

Fujisaki said that when Amano was Japan’s permanent representative to international organizations in Vienna, he had visited Geneva, where Fujisaki was then a diplomat. Amano had learned ballroom dancing and said that he had been invited to compete in the European Championship, Fujisaki recalled. But Amano had decided not to take part because he didn’t want anyone in Tokyo “to think that he was not concentrating on the job,” Fujisaki said.

Amano was a strong advocate against nuclear proliferation, and his views were shaped by the fact that his country is the only one to have experienced the devastation of having such weapons used on its soil.

“He lent an ear to survivors of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and urged that ‘nuclear weapons should be abolished,’” the Japanese daily Sankei Shimbun reported in a 2009 article.

While head of the nuclear agency, Amano also oversaw safety efforts after the disaster at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011 in his home country after an earthquake and a tsunami battered the facility causing a meltdown.

Four years after the episode, Amano delivered a statement to the agency’s governing board and said he believed the Fukushima accident had brought nuclear safety into sharper focus.

“There can be no grounds for complacency about nuclear safety in any country,” he told the board at the time. “Continuous questioning and openness to learning from experience are key to a safety culture and are essential for everyone involved in nuclear power. Safety must always come first.”

Taro Kono, Japan’s foreign minister, said in a statement Monday that Amano had not only “vigorously addressed international nuclear nonproliferation issues” but also had helped develop the peaceful use of nuclear power.

During his tenure, Amano also established a team to prepare for the resumption of IAEA inspections in North Korea if an agreement were reached between Washington and Pyongyang, the state news outlet NHK reported.

Federica Mogherini, the EU’s top foreign policy official, wrote on Twitter that she was “saddened by the loss” of Amano.

“A man of extraordinary dedication &amp; professionalism, always at the service of the global community in the most impartial way,” she wrote. “I’ll never forget the work done together. It has been for me a great pleasure &amp; privilege working with him.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/22/world/asia/yukiya-amano-dead.html" id="b5893367-4a63-3b5a-afbe-e87c6ea08e26">The New York Times</a>.

Yukiya Amano, an advocate for nuclear nonproliferation who played a key role in monitoring Iran’s compliance with the landmark 2015 nuclear deal as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has died, the organization said in a statement on Monday. He was 72.

Yukiya Amano, Head of the Nuclear Watchdog Group IAEA, Dies at 72

The meeting was called to address decades of abuse disclosures that have rattled the church, eroded trust in its leadership and driven away some of the faithful.

The gathering is intended to be a moment to realign and move forward, and before it began, in what many saw as a significant step, the Vatican expelled Theodore E. McCarrick, a former cardinal and archbishop of Washington, from the priesthood. It was the first time any cardinal has been defrocked for sexual abuse.

But while the church expressed hope that the four-day meeting of 190 participants from across the world, including Pope Francis, would mark a turning point, there is a risk that fresh controversies may overshadow it.

Gay priests are starting to speak out.

The accusations that McCarrick, as an archbishop, had abused his seminary students and young priests — and not only children — caused some Catholic conservatives to call for the expulsion of gay men from the priesthood.

Despite repeated studies showing no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia, some Catholic bishops and conservative church media outlets have laid the blame for the sexual abuse on homosexuality inside the church.

Now, gay priests are increasingly speaking out, demanding recognition both of their role in the church and the fact that their sexual orientation has no connection to the abuse perpetrated by others.

Though fewer than about 10 priests in the United States have come out publicly, gay priests and researchers estimate that gay men probably make up at least 30 to 40 percent of the Catholic clergy in the United States. Like all Catholic priests, they take a vow of celibacy.

Two dozen priests and seminarians from 13 states shared details of their lives as gay men within the church with The New York Times. They offered a look at a life in the shadows that some said was less like a closet than a jail.

Pope Francis once famously signaled more openness to gay priests when he said, “Who am I to judge?” But since then he has seemed to reverse course. Last year, Francis called homosexuality “fashionable” and recommended that men with “this deep-seated tendency” not be accepted into the priesthood.

In the Netherlands this week, a group of gay priests made public a letter sent to Francis late last year calling out the church’s stance on homosexuality in the priesthood. It said Vatican leaders “tend to suggest that those priests who are openly gay are the ones responsible for the sexual abuse of children and minors,” and asked for a rethinking of the policies around gay priests.

The debate promises to make its way into the bishop meetings.

The Vatican has guidelines for priests who father children.

While Catholic priests make a commitment to a life of celibacy, the Vatican has an internal protocol for dealing with the children of those who violate that vow. The Times made it public this week.

The Vatican confirmed that its department overseeing Catholic priests globally has general guidelines for what to do when clerics father children.

Sometimes the children are born from relationships between priests and women in the community — or nuns. But other children are the consequence of rape.

The internal church document, which is from 2017, lays out guidelines for the “protection of the child,” a Vatican spokesman said.

And though it requests that priests leave the church if they father children, there is no requirement that they do so.

Some believe this may become the newest scandal to rock the church. Advocates for “children of the ordained,” as the church calls them, anticipate that many more cases will be revealed, though there is no clear sense of how many children have been fathered by priests.

Nuns, too, have been abused, the pope says.

This month, Pope Francis acknowledged for the first time the abuse of nuns at the hands of priests and other church officials, something he said was an ongoing problem. The issue has long been overshadowed by other scandals within the church, but the pontiff’s admission may change that.

While advocates for victims applauded the pope’s comments, it is unclear what the church plans to do about the problem. It is also unclear how widespread the abuse is.

There have been many accounts of nuns being abused in Africa and India. Nuns who are financially dependent on priests or bishops in positions of power are especially vulnerable to attack.

In the Indian state of Kerala, a prominent bishop is facing charges that he repeatedly raped a nun. The bishop, Franco Mulakkal, has denied the accusations, but dozens of nuns signed a letter urging the Vatican to remove him.

And still more nuns have stepped forward to report sexual abuse at the hands of priests, the police in Kerala say.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/21/world/europe/catholic-church-sex-abuse.html" id="c857af14-d411-3bee-a0cd-7c501a200e0e">The New York Times</a>.

A series of scandals will be looming large in the eyes of church leaders and Vatican watchers alike during a highly anticipated conference on child abuse in the Roman Catholic Church on Thursday.

Gay Priests, Secret Rules and the Abuse of Nuns: Some of the Vatican Controversies as Bishops Meet

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Megan Specia

Articles written by the author

Yukiya Amano, Head of the Nuclear Watchdog Group IAEA, Dies at 72

Gay Priests, Secret Rules and the Abuse of Nuns: Some of the Vatican Controversies as Bishops Meet