VATICAN CITY — The Vatican revised its in-house rules to deal with clerical sex-abuse cases Thursday, targeting priests who molest the mentally disabled as well as children and doubling the statute of limitations for such crimes.
Abuse victims said the rules are little more than administrative housekeeping since they made few substantive changes to current practice. What is needed, they said, are bold new rules to punish bishops who shield pedophiles.
Women’s ordination groups criticized the new rules because they included the attempted ordination of women as a “grave crime” subject to the same set of procedures and punishments meted out for sex abuse.
The rules, which cover the canonical procedures and penalties for the most serious sacramental and moral crimes, were issued as the Vatican confronts one of the worst scandals in recent history: revelations of hundreds of new cases of priests who raped and sodomized children, bishops who covered up for them, and Vatican officials who stood by passively for decades.
In 2003, the Vatican streamlined its 2001 procedures for disciplining abusive priests, allowing them to be defrocked without a lengthy canonical trial if the evidence against them was overwhelming. The rules issued Thursday codified those procedures into church law.
While the bulk of the document codifies existing practice, some new elements were introduced: Priests who possess or distribute child pornography and those who sexually abuse developmentally disabled adults will be subject to the same procedures and punishments as priests who molest minors.
Statute of limitations now 20 years
The new rules extend the statute of limitations for handling of priestly abuse cases from 10 years to 20 years after the victim’s 18th birthday, and the statute of limitations can be extended beyond that on a case-by-case basis. Such extensions have been routine for years, but now the waivers are codified.
But the new rules make no mention of the need for bishops to report clerical sex abuse to police, provide no canonical sanctions for bishops who cover up for abusers and do not include any “zero-tolerance” policy for pedophile priests as demanded by some victims.
Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican’s sex-crimes prosecutor, defended the absence of any mention of the need to report abuse to police, saying all Christians were required to obey civil laws that would already demand sex crimes be reported.
The Vatican noted that bishops were reminded of this duty in a set of informal guidelines issued earlier this year and that its Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex-crime allegations, was working with bishops’ conferences around the world to develop more “rigorous, coherent and effective” guidelines.
Ordination of women a “wound”
Scicluna also defended the inclusion of ordination of women and sex abuse in the same document as a way of codifying two of the most serious canonical crimes against sacraments and morals that the congregation deals with. Also included are other sacramental crimes, including for the first time heresy, apostasy and schism.
Abuse is “an egregious violation of moral law,” Scicluna said. “An attempted ordination of a woman is grave, but on another level, it is a wound, it is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacrament of (holy) orders. So they are grave, but on different levels.”
Archbishop Robert Zollitsch, the dean of Germany’s bishops conference, welcomed the new guidelines. “The injustice of the past is being cleared, and the conclusions for the present and the future are being drawn,” he said.
