One afternoon in mid-December, Pope Francis had a gathering that wasn’t on his official agenda or otherwise recorded, that underscored the utter dysfunction of the Catholic Church’s response to the worldwide clergy sex abuse scandal.
In the essential reception room of the Vatican hotel where he lives, Francis met for greater than an hour with a Spaniard who as a young seminarian was molested by his spiritual director. The former seminarian was desperate.
He had lodged a criticism with the Toledo, Spain Archdiocese in 2009, and visited Vatican offices multiple times to deposit damning documents and demand motion be taken against his abuser and the bishops who allegedly covered for him. But for 15 years, he had received no justice from the church.
While Francis’ decision to listen to his story was laudable and pastorally sensitive, it was also evidence that the church’s in-house system to cope with abuse is not working — from the laws available to punish abusers to its policies for helping survivors. For every victim who has enough well-connected friends on the Vatican who can arrange a papal audience, countless others won’t ever feel that the church cares for them or will provide them justice.
Five years ago this week, Francis convened an unprecedented summit of bishops from all over the world to impress on them that clergy abuse was a world problem they usually needed to handle it. Over 4 days, these bishops heard harrowing tales of trauma from victims, learned how one can investigate and sanction pedophile priests, and were warned that they too would face punishment in the event that they continued to cover for abusers.
Yet five years later, despite latest church laws to carry bishops accountable and guarantees to do higher, the Catholic Church’s in-house legal system and pastoral response to victims has proven still incapable of coping with the issue.
STAKEHOLDERS WARN CHURCH’S EVOLVING RESPONSE STILL HARMS VICTIMS
In fact, victims, outside investigators and even in-house canon lawyers increasingly say the church’s response, crafted and amended over 20 years of unrelenting scandal all over the world, is damaging to the very people already harmed — the victims. They are sometimes retraumatized once they summon the courage to report abuse within the face of the church’s silence, stonewalling and inaction.
“It’s a horrific experience. And it’s not something that I might advise anyone to do unless they’re prepared to have not only their world, but their sense of being turned the other way up,” said Brian Devlin, a former Scottish priest whose internal, after which public accusations of sexual misconduct against the late Scottish Cardinal Keith O’Brien marked O’Brien’s downfall.
“You change into the troublemaker. You change into the whistleblower. And I can well understand that folks who undergo that process find yourself with larger problems than that they had before they began it. It’s a hugely, hugely, destructive process.”
Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger revolutionized the way in which the Catholic Church handled abusive clergy in 2001, when he persuaded St. John Paul II to order all abuse cases be sent to his office for review.
Ratzinger acted because, after nearly 1 / 4 century on the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he had seen that bishops weren’t following the church’s own laws and were moving predators around from parish to parish moderately than sanctioning them.
At the top of his 2019 summit, Francis vowed to confront abusive clergy with “the wrath of God.” Within months, he passed a latest law requiring all abuse to be reported in-house to church authorities (but to not police) and mapped out procedures to analyze bishops who abused or protected predator priests.
But five years later, the Vatican has offered no statistics on the variety of bishops investigated or sanctioned. Even the pope’s own child protection advisory commission says structural problems built into the system are harming victims and stopping basic justice.
“Recent publicly reported cases point to tragically harmful deficiencies within the norms intended to punish abusers and hold accountable those whose duty is to handle wrongdoing,” the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said after its last assembly. “We are long overdue in fixing the failings in procedures that leave victims wounded and at nighttime each during and after cases have been decided.”
At the 2019 summit, the norms enacted by the U.S. Catholic Church for sanctioning priests and protecting minors were touted because the gold standard. The U.S. bishops adopted a get-tough policy after the U.S. abuse scandal exploded with the 2002 Boston Globe “Spotlight” series.
SOME SAY VICTIMS SHOULD SKIP PURSUING JUSTICE FROM THE CHURCH
But even within the U.S., victims and canon lawyers say the system isn’t working, and that’s not even taking into account the brand new frontier of abuse cases involving adult victims. Some call it “charter fatigue,” that the hierarchy simply desires to move on beyond the scandal that spawned the 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
The Rev. Tom Doyle, a U.S. canon lawyer who worked for the Vatican embassy in Washington and now provides consulting for victims, says he not advises they pursue church justice.
Why? Because “the church will screw them every which way from Sunday,” he said.
“Don’t waste your time,” Doyle says he tells victims. “The only justice, or semblance of justice that has been meted out is in civilian courts since the church can’t screw them up.”
Nearly every investigation into abuse within the Catholic Church that has been published lately has identified the church’s in-house legal system as an enormous a part of the issue, from church-commissioned reports in France and Germany to government inquests in Australia, parliamentary-mandated studies in Spain and law enforcement investigations within the U.S.
While some reforms have occurred, including Francis’ lifting of the official secrecy covering abuse cases in 2019, core issues remain.
Part of the issue is that canon law was never meant to handle the needs of abuse survivors or to assist them heal: As stated the penal code, the goal of the system is entirely institution-centric: to “restore justice, reform the offender and repair scandal.”
REPORTS IDENTIFY SPECIFIC ISSUES WITH CHURCH’S LATEST POLICIES
Even after the Vatican announced a revised penal code, greater than a decade within the making, the surface reports were remarkably uniform in identifying:
—The structural conflict of interest built into the system. According to church procedures, a bishop or religious superior investigates an allegation that considered one of his priests raped a baby after which renders judgement. And yet the bishop or superior has a vested interest, because the priest is taken into account to be a spiritual son in whom the bishop has invested time, money and love.
It is difficult to think about every other legal system on the planet where someone with such a private, paternal relationship with one party in a dispute might be expected to objectively and fairly render judgment in it.
The independent commission that investigated the French church’s abuse scandal said such a structural conflict of interest “appears, humanly speaking, untenable.”
Even the pope’s own Synod of Bishops got here to an identical conclusion. In their November synthesis document after a monthlong meeting, the world’s bishops identified conflict of interest as an ongoing problem.
“The sensitive issue of handling abuse places many bishops within the difficult situation of getting to reconcile the role of father with that of judge,” said the synod report, suggesting that the duty of judgment be assigned to “other structures.”
—The lack of fundamental rights for victims. In canonical abuse investigations, victims are mere third-party witnesses to their cases. They cannot take part in any of the key proceedings, they don’t have any access to case files and no right to even know if a canonical investigation has been began, much less its status.
Only resulting from a Francis reform in 2019 are victims allowed to know the final word final result of their case, but nothing else.
The Spanish ombudsman, tasked by the country’s congress of deputies to analyze abuse within the Spanish Catholic Church, said victims are sometimes retraumatized by such a process.
“Despite the regulations enforced over the previous few years, if we take into consideration international and national standards on the minimum rights of victims in criminal proceedings, the rights and wishes of victims in canon law proceedings proceed to be neglected,” the report found.
The French experts went further, arguing that the Vatican is basically in breach of its obligations as a U.N. observer state and member of the Council of Europe, which requires upholding the fundamental human rights of victims.
Citing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights, the French report noted that a fundamental right includes access to a good trial “which guarantees, specifically, the proper of access to independent justice and an adversarial procedure, and, for the victim, the proper to an efficient treatment.”
“Canon law will only have the opportunity to offer a real response to the sexual abuse of youngsters and vulnerable individuals within the Catholic Church if it meets the universally recognized requirements of justice and whether it is implemented more effectively,” the French commission concluded.
—No published case law. Unlike the Vatican tribunal generally known as the Roman Rota, which publishes redacted marriage annulment cases, the Vatican’s sex abuse office doesn’t publish any of its decisions about how clergy sexual abuse cases have been adjudicated.
That signifies that a bishop investigating an accusation against considered one of his priests has no way of knowing how the law has been applied in an identical case. It means canon law students don’t have any case law to review or cite. It means academics, journalists and even victims don’t have any way of knowing what forms of behavior gets sanctioned and whether penalties are being imposed arbitrarily or not.
Independent legal experts who investigated clergy abuse in Munich, Germany, said the publication of canonical decisions would help eliminate uncertainties for victims in how church law was being applied. Australia’s Royal Commission, the very best type of inquest within the country, similarly called for the publication of abuse decisions, in redacted form, and to offer written reasons for his or her decisions “in a timely manner.”
In-house, canon lawyers for years have complained that the dearth of published cases was deepening doubts concerning the credibility and effectiveness of the churches’ response to the church scandal.
“This lack of systematic publication of the jurisprudence of the very best courts within the church is unworthy of a real legal system,” Kurt Martens, a professor at Catholic University of America told a canon law conference in Rome late last 12 months.
Monsignor John Kennedy, who heads the Vatican office investigating abuse cases, said his staff was working diligently to process cases and had received praise from individual bishops, entire conferences who visit and non secular superiors.
“We don’t discuss what we do in public however the feedback we receive and the comments from our members who recently met for the Plenaria are very encouraging,” he wrote to The Associated Press. “The pope also expressed his gratitude for the good work that is finished in silence.”
But such praise appears to come back mostly from the hierarchy, not those that have been harmed: the victims.
They are left to languish, even when — as now advised by the church — they report their abuse. The Spanish seminarian who met with the pope first filed his criticism against his abuser with the Toledo Archdiocese in 2009. But the Toledo archbishop only launched an internal investigation in 2021 and informed the Vatican, after Spain’s El Pais newspaper reported on the case.
The AP doesn’t discover sexual abuse victims unless they decide to go public.
In October, a Spanish criminal court convicted the priest and sentenced him to seven years. An appeals court recently voided the sentence on a technicality.
The seminarian has remained in contact with Francis and recently wrote him saying he was “exhausted” with the method but had nevertheless appealed to Spain’s Supreme Court.
Francis called him right back and encouraged him to maintain fighting, he said.
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