ROME, Italy, February 10, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Catholic bishops must be held accountable for their mishandling of sex abuse cases, the Vatican’s top prosecutor urged this week.
Msgr. Charles Scicluna, the promoter of justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said it is “unacceptable” for bishops to ignore existing policies for disciplining priests and insisted that canon law provisions allowing for penalties against bishops who are guilty of “negligence and malice” ought to be applied more rigorously.
“We need to be vigilant in choosing candidates for the important role of bishop, and we also need to use the tools that canonical law and tradition give us for the accountability of bishops,” he told reporters at a four-day symposium sponsored by the Vatican on the handling of sex abuse cases, according to John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter.
Msgr. Scicluna criticized the “deadly culture of silence” and “deliberate denial of known facts” and said, for example, that the Irish Catholic Church “has paid a very high price for the mistakes of some of its shepherds.”
He pointed out that penalties for “clergy” under canon law can be equally applied to bishops, even though that fact is often “ignored.”
“It’s not a question of changing laws, but of applying what we have,” he said.
The prelate acknowledged that it falls to the Pope to discipline bishops, but suggested the pope’s representatives in the various countries (known as apostolic nuncios) should send him the evidence he needs to act.
“The nuncio to a country represents the concerns of the Holy Father to that local church, but he also has the duty to listen to the people in order to convey the concerns of the local church to the Holy Father,” he said.
Faithful Catholics have long complained that efforts to combat the sex abuse scandal have been impeded by bishops’ unwillingness to have themselves be held accountable.
In 2002, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Nebraska stood as the only American prelate to denounce the U.S. Bishops’ Dallas Charter because the only group of Church employees for whom it did not establish standards of behavior was the bishops themselves.
Philip Lawler, the editor of Catholic World News and an expert on the sex abuse crisis, told LifeSiteNews that Msgr. Scicluna has been “consistently aggressive” in his attack against sexual abuse during his tenure at the Vatican, but “he has steadily gained backing for that approach, particularly since the election of Benedict XVI.”
“It’s instructive to notice the evolution in Vatican policy,” said Lawler. “When the scandal erupted in the US, only one bishop resigned because of his complicity in covering up abuse. When it hit Ireland, several bishops resigned. Clearly the Vatican was more aware of the damage that had been done by the bishops who failed to discipline the offenders.”
Lawler said Msgr. Scicluna’s comments highlight the fact that bishops have always had the authority they needed to handle abusive priests under canon law. “The problem was not a failure of canon law, but a failure to invoke canon law,” he said.
“The misconduct of some priests has been appalling. But equally appalling – and even more damaging to the faith in the long run – has been the willingness of bishops to mislead the faithful, traduce the innocent, and protect the guilty,” said Lawler.