Vatican Church Towards Healing and Renewal

From the editor’s desk

Welcome change of approach

11 February 2012
http://www.thetablet.co.uk/article/162319

To describe the covering up of clerical abuse in the Church as equivalent to omertà – the code by which Mafia bosses enforce the secrecy of their own criminal actions – is to use language as strong as any employed by the Church’s critics over the last 10 years. The fact that it comes from Mgr Charles Scicluna, Promoter of Justice at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the man with responsibility for dealing with the thousands of child-abuse cases reported to the Vatican, suggests that he and his colleagues have fully grasped the extent of the evil that infected the Church over this matter. Mafia bosses are, above all, interested in self-protection; they flee from justice. The failure of the Church in the past to ensure justice for the victims of child abuse has emerged as no less of a scandal than the abuse itself, made worse when it was the result of actions by persons in authority. It was a crime in canon law to show malicious or fraudulent negligence in the exercise of one’s duty, Mgr Scicluna said, indicating that bishops could be deposed from their sees for falling down in their duty in this respect.

He was speaking in Rome at the end of an international symposium, entitled “Towards Healing and Renewal”, sponsored by the Pontifical Gregorian University and attended by more than 100 bishops and 30 religious superiors. One abuse survivor who spoke called for bishops to be stripped of their posts if they failed to protect children from predatory paedophile priests. There are still notorious cases of high-level Church officials who have never faced justice for their errors of neglect. 

The holding of the symposium, and the seriousness with which people such as Cardinal William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, treated it, suggests that this department of the Vatican at least has caught up with the expectations of clergy and laity worldwide. They have at times been exasperated by the apparent inability of the official Church to grasp the enormity of the crisis. There were glimpses, nevertheless, of problems still unresolved. For instance, an American priest psychologist who has dealt with clerical child abusers said the organisational structure of the Church was skewed in favour of offenders, who were more likely to be believed by their bishops than those complaining of abuse. But there may be an even deeper problem – the “invisibility of the victim” in a system that concentrates on the sin of the perpetrator, as if that were the more urgent issue. 

It was emphasised in the course of the symposium that the needs of victims should be the Church’s first priority. But that is hard to square with the experience of an abuse survivor who seeks compensation in the courts, and finds the Church’s lawyers hiding behind every legal nicety. A fulsome and sincere apology, such as that issued by Archbishop Bernard Longley of Birmingham after a criminal case this week, is of far more use to a victim than a legal wrangle. Overall, however, the fact of this symposium and the frankness with which it was conducted – despite the unnecessary exclusion of the press from its proceedings – represents a big step forward. It is not just victims who need healing, but the Church itself.