Friday April 9, 2010
Vatican to Introduce “Zero Tolerance” Rules on Clerical Sex Abuse: Reports
By Hilary White
ROME, April 9, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) will produce a new set of protocols to be applied globally in dealing with sexual abuse of minors by clerics, according to a report from the Italian daily La Stampa. The paper said that the new rules will be modeled on the “zero tolerance” policy instituted by the U.S. bishops in 2002. Individual bishops must implement the new unified rules or resign.
Rome Reports, an English language daily news service based in Rome, said that the measures will include the automatic suspension of priests who are accused and the immediate reporting of accusations to the local law enforcement as well as the release of all documentation to civil authorities. The process of laicization for priests found to be guilty will be speeded up, and the canonical statute of limitations, currently ten years after the alleged offense, will be abolished.
In addition, seminarians will undergo more rigorous psychological screening that will focus on their “affectivity and human maturity.”
Rome Reports says that the new rules are expected to be issued in the autumn, but may be released sooner due to the increasing number of allegations that are coming forward.
At the same time, in a statement issued today, Fr. Frederico Lombardi SJ, head of the Vatican’s press office, appeared to suggest that a lack of diligence on the part of ecclesiastical authorities in applying existing canonical norms served to exacerbate the problem of sex abuse.
“It has happened that a number of leaders of communities and institutions, through inexperience or unpreparedness, have not had a ready understanding of the protocols and criteria for intervention which could have helped them intervene decisively even when this was very difficult or painful for them, also because they were often surprised by the accusations,” he said.
Lombardi said ecclesiastical authorities must implement “decisively and truthfully, the correct procedures for the canonical judgment of the guilty, and for collaborating with the civil authorities in matters concerning their judicial and penal competencies, taking the specific norms and situations of the various countries into account.”
In his March letter to Irish Catholics, Pope Benedict castigated Church authorities in Ireland for having “failed, at times grievously, to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse.”
David Quinn, a regular columnist on religious affairs for the Irish Independent, writing for the Times on the Irish abuse scandals, has also said that while the Dublin archdiocese “disastrously” mishandled complaint of abuse, after the mid-1990s, cases were dealt with “properly” by applying existing norms of canon law.
While the media and pundits continue to blame the rule of celibacy for priests and canon law, the Irish government’s Murphy Report, which revealed the crisis, also linked it directly to the failure by Church leadership “to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with child sex abuse.”
“Canon law appears to have fallen into disuse and disrespect during the mid 20th century,” the report said. “In particular, there was little or no experience of operating the penal (that is, the criminal) provision of that law… for many years offenders were neither prosecuted nor made accountable within the Church.”
For his part, David Quinn speculated that canon law was ignored in the Post-Vatican II era because it was regarded by the hierarchy of the time as “overly legalistic and too focused on punishment.” “They decided it lacked compassion,” he wrote.
Instead, he said, prelates in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s turned to popular therapies they were told would “cure” predatory homosexuals of their desire to molest boys and young men.
“The bottom line,” Quinn wrote, “is that if canon law had been used properly, fewer children would have been abused. Civil authorities would still not have been informed, but priests found guilty of child abuse under Church law would have been punished and likely removed from ministry making it more difficult for them to offend again.”
Referring to the crisis as the “problem of pedophilia,” Vatican spokesman Fr. Lombardi also said in today’s statement that “documents such as the national U.S. report on the mistreatment of children deserve to be better known in order to understand what fields require urgent social intervention, and the proportions of the problem.”
Although Lombardi declined to name either the report or its findings, his reference was likely to the 2004 John Jay Report commissioned by the USCCB, that showed almost 90 per cent of cases of sexual abuse by clerics were of homosexuals preying on adolescents and young men.
Lombardi said, “Achieving a healthy maturity of the personality, also from a sexual point of view, has always been a difficult challenge, but today it is particularly so.”
Speaking on the screening and formation of seminarians, Lombardi said, “It has been observed that the greatest frequency of abuses coincided with the most intense period of the ‘sexual revolution’ of past decades. Formation must take account of this context and of the more general context of secularization.”