New Vatican guidelines on child abuse by priests – a smokescreen for no change
New Vatican guidelines for the handling of sex-abuse charges against priests that have been sent to over 4000 bishops worldwide were condemned today as a smokescreen signifying no change at all.
The guidelines purport to encourage bishops to report any “credible allegations” to civil law-enforcement officials, but in fact the regime of secrecy and delay will continue unabated.
All cases still have to be referred to the Vatican for decision and bishops are told only to report cases to the secular authorities if it is “without prejudice to the sacramental internal forum” which probably means cases should be heard, where it is possible, in secret under canon law, which provides for no more serious penalty than defrocking. And even that sanction is to be applied in only the most extreme cases.
Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the National Secular Society, who has raised at the United Nations Human Right Council the issue of the Vatican’s inability to face its responsibilities, said: “This is no change at all, although the Vatican will try to produce a smokescreeen to convince everyone that the problem has been properly addressed. They are guidelines rather than rules, there is no indication who will decide what constitutes ‘credible’ allegations and they will not be mandatory. Moreover, they do not require bishops to report abuse they are personally aware of. They will only act if there is a complaint from a victim, and then only if the bishop gives the OK – which he has complete authority not to do, particularly if it might bring the church into disrepute.”
Mr Wood continued: “Throughout the 1990s, US bishops almost entirely ignored their own similar voluntary guidelines on abuse. The Philadelphia archdiocese kept dozens of credibly accused priests in ministry for years until very recently, according to prosecutors and grand jurors.”
The NSS have welcomed Amnesty International’s naming of the Vatican in its 2011 report into human rights abuses around the world. Amnesty criticises the Vatican, and its political arm the Holy See, for failing to honour its obligations under the United Nations Charter on the Rights of the Child, to which it is a signatory.
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- New York priest defrocked for child sex abuse – CNN
