Survivors of clergy sexual abuse urged the Vatican on Monday to adopt the identical zero-tolerance policy that it approved for the U.S. Catholic Church in 2002, arguing that there’s no reason why children world wide should not be kept just as protected from predator priests.
The U.S. norms, adopted at the peak of the abuse scandal there, say a priest can be permanently faraway from church ministry based on even a single act of sexual abuse that’s either admitted to or established under church law.
That “one strike and also you’re out” policy within the U.S. has long stood out because the hardest within the church. It is held up by some because the gold standard, by others as excessive and by still others as imperfect but higher than most. It was adopted by U.S. bishops as they scrambled to attempt to retain credibility following the revelations of abuse and cover-up in Boston documented by the Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” series.
Since then, the church abuse scandal has erupted globally, and survivors from world wide said Monday there’s no reason why the U.S. norms couldn’t and shouldn’t be applied universally. They called for changes within the church’s in-house canon law and reasoned they could possibly be approved because the Holy See approved the norms for the U.S. church.
“Despite Pope Francis’ repeated calls for zero tolerance on abuse, his words have yet to steer to any real motion,” said Gemma Hickey, a transgender survivor of abuse and the president of the worldwide survivor network Ending Clergy Abuse.
The proposal launched at a press conference was hammered out during an unusual meeting in June in Rome between survivors and a number of the Catholic hierarchy’s top priestly experts on stopping abuse. It was described by participants on the time as a “historic collaboration” between two groups that usually talk past each other, given victims’ deep distrust of the Catholic hierarchy.
The priestly participants in that meeting included the Rev. Hans Zollner, who heads the church’s fundamental academic think tank on safeguarding; the No. 2 on the Vatican’s child protection advisory board, Bishop Luis Manuel Ali Herrera; and the Gregorian University’s canon law dean, the Rev. Ulrich Rhode in addition to diplomats from the U.S., Australian and other embassies.
However, there was apparently nobody from the Vatican legal office, secretariat of state or the discipline section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, which processes all abuse cases worldwide and largely sets policy on applying the church’s canon law — albeit in secret since its cases are never published.
As a result, it was unclear what would turn out to be of the proposed policy changes, given the U.S. norms only got here about because U.S. bishops pushed the Vatican to approve them, driven by their outraged flocks and insurance firms.
The latest call faces an uphill battle because the Vatican lately has repeatedly insisted on “proportionality” in its sentences for abuse, refusing to use a one-size-fits-all approach and considering cultural differences in countries where abuse is not as openly discussed because it is within the West.
That has resulted in seemingly light punishments for even confirmed cases of abuse which, within the U.S., would have resulted in a priest being permanently faraway from ministry.
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