Fending off accusations that it covered up abuse and obstructed justice, the Vatican on Monday spelled out for the first time that it now strongly urges bishops to report abuse cases to civil authorities if required by local law.
Victims of abuse by priests have long argued that the Vatican's rules requiring confidentiality and the avoidance of scandal were often tantamount to obstructing civil justice, an argument that has contributed to the Catholic Church paying more than $2 billion in abuse settlements in the United States alone in the past decade.
On Monday, the Vatican posted online for the first time a guide to the procedures it requires bishops to follow in abuse cases. It says that in the preliminary stages of any investigation into alleged abuse, "civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed."
Although not all the guidelines have the force of canon law, Vatican observers said that posting them online was an important step toward explaining internal Vatican procedures that have often been criticized as opaque and ambiguous. The guidelines could suggest, experts said, that the Vatican is moving toward the stricter reporting requirements that the American church adopted in the wake of the sex scandals it faced a decade ago. The Vatican is currently revising the norms for how bishops worldwide should handle sex abuse cases.
Vatican officials say they have been advising bishops to follow civil law in reporting abuse cases for some time - yet they acknowledge that those norms were often unevenly applied and not always clear.
Asked how bishops were expected to know to report abuse to civil authorities if canon law did not spell that out, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said, "Because they're citizens of a state." But he conceded that such reporting had not always happened. "No one is saying things were perfect," he said.
Lombardi said the Vatican had posted the guide online in an effort at "clarification and transparency."
The guide explains how the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful Vatican office that handles cases of priestly abuse, can authorize a local bishop to pursue various procedures against a priest accused of abuse, including a judicial penal trial. In some cases, the Congregation can directly ask the pope to defrock a priest who has acknowledged his crimes, "for the good of the church," the guide says.
Last week Pope Benedict XVI faced fresh accusations of how he personally had handled similar cases as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. On Friday, the Associated Press published a letter indicating that in the 1980s, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the pope, had waited more than three years to respond to a bishop in Oakland, Calif., who had asked to defrock a priest who had molested children, only to advise that the matter needed more time and that "the good of the universal church" needed to be considered in reaching a decision.
The procedures outlined in the online guide draw on 1983 canon law as well as a 2001 revision to canon law that centralized all abuse cases with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
They also draw on certain "special faculties" that the Congregation was granted in 2002 and 2003 by Pope John Paul II at the request Ratzinger, then the congregation's prefect, that streamline some disciplinary procedures, according to a canon
lawyer familiar with the norms.
While some people in general applauded the Vatican's posting of the online guide on Monday, others said that even the imperative to report to civil authorities did not go far enough. "If the Vatican truly wants to change course, it would be far more effective to fire or demote bishops who have clearly endangered kids and enabled abuse and hid crimes, than to add one sentence to a policy that is rarely followed with consistency," Joelle Casteix, the western regional director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, said in a statement.
On a visit to Chile on Monday, the Vatican secretary of state, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said that he thought Benedict "would take other initiatives" to fight the sex abuse scandal, the ANSA news agency reported. "He will not neglect to surprise us," Bertone said.
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