VATICAN CITY — The Vatican is cracking down on priests who sexually abuse mentally impaired adults, sanctioning them with the same set of punishments meted out for clerics who rape and molest children.
A church source close to the Vatican told The Associated Press on Thursday that a soon-to-be-released Vatican document on handling clerical abuse of minors under age 18 also would refer to adults with an “imperfect use of reason.”
Such particularly vulnerable victims will have their cases handled directly by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under a special set of norms that can result in a priest being quickly defrocked without a canonical trial.
The source asked that his name not be used because the document has not yet been released to the public.
The instruction from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith will be the first major document to be published since the clerical-abuse scandal entered the spotlight again earlier this year as hundreds of new cases came to light of priests who molested children, bishops who covered up for them and Vatican officials who turned a blind eye for decades.
The church’s internal-justice system for dealing with abuse allegations has come under attack because of claims by victims that their accusations were long ignored by bishops more concerned about protecting the church and by the Congregation, which was headed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger from 1981 until he was elected pope in 2005.
The bulk of the new document is expected to merely codify the ad hoc norms for dealing canonically with pedophile priests that are currently in use, making them permanent and legally binding. The 10-year statute of limitations is expected to be extended, although it already has been on a case-by-case basis since 2002.
In addition, buying, selling or possessing child pornography also is expected to be listed as a canonical crime handled by the Congregation for the first time in a Vatican instruction, although the Vatican’s sex-crimes prosecutor, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, has written that it has been considered such for several years.
The reference to priests who abuse mentally impaired adults marks a concrete new element that drew cautious praise Thursday from the main U.S. victims’ group, the Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests.
“It’s a small, positive, long-overdue step,” said SNAP president Barbara Blaine. “Often, mentally diminished adults are just as vulnerable to shrewd predators as children are.” But she cautioned that enforcement was key.
