By Jennifer Macey
ABC News
July 16, 2010
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/07/16/2955994.htm
[with audio]
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| The new rules speed up procedures to de-frock priests who have been found guilty of abuse. |
The Vatican has revised its rules for dealing with child sex abuse cases within the Catholic Church, but victims groups say the new rules do not go far not enough.
The new rules speed up procedures to de-frock priests who have been found guilty of abuse.
They also double - to 20 years - the time frame in which a congregation can investigate a case after the victim's 18th birthday.
But victims groups are angry there are no specific guidelines requiring the Church to report priests to the police.
Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's internal prosecutor in charge of handling sex abuse cases, says the rules were revised to speed up the process of investigating cases and disciplining priests.
"It gives a signal that we are very, very serious on our commitment to promote safe environments and to offer an adequate response to abuse," he said.
Monsignor Scicluna says possession and distribution of child pornography is now a crime under Church law as well as civil law.
The statute of limitations has been doubled so that churches can investigate cases of abuse until the victim is 38 years old.
The sex abuse of mentally disabled adults will now be treated in the same way as the abuse of children.
"I think this is a very important step from the point of canon law, from the technical point of view but a document is always a document," Monsignor Scicluna said.
"It does not solve all the problems. It is a very important instrument but then it is the way you use the instruments that is going to have the real effect on the life of the Church."
Survivors of Clergy Abuse Australia (SCAA) spokeswoman Nicky Davis says there should be no time limit on when a victim can come forward.
"These are guidelines for how to pretend you are doing something different from the usual cover-up," she said.
"They should abolish the statute of limitations but this is just playing around the edges.
"This is not getting to actually helping victims recover or dealing with these criminals in their ranks who they are still allowing to re-abuse and until they deal with those issues, anything else is literally just avoiding the issue."
Geelong Parish Priest Father Kevin Dillon, a noted advocate for victims, agrees there should be no statute of limitations.
"I am not sure why there would be a statute of limitations on something like this," he said.
"The very nature of the offence is such that things like the repressed memory, post-traumatic stress disorder, the very nature of the fact that it can take people a lifetime to acknowledge to themselves - let alone to anybody else - of what has happened to them would mean that to try and put a limit on those things does not perhaps acknowledge the full depth of the damage that has been done."
Bishops not accountable
Victims' groups are also unhappy that the revised rules do not require bishops to report sexual abuse cases to police and do not hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch.
"That is a very big omission there and let me tell you that in my own case, which has undergone police investigations, I am finding out all the time more details about what went on in the past," Ms Davis said.
"To my knowledge, I believe there is a huge amount of information which still today, it hasn't been given to the police and the first the police ever knew about my abuser - despite admissions from the Church - was when I took the matter to them in 2008.
"So until then, the Catholic Church were completely hiding the fact that they knew about these crimes."
Father Dillon says the church should improve the way it deals with this issue and victims' groups should be consulted before new guidelines are issued.
"[When we] deal with the people who have been traumatised and victimised in such a dreadful and disgraceful and life-changing way, we should leave no stone unturned to make sure that we have the very best and most compassionate and just system we can possibly find anywhere in the world," he said.
Also included in the list of grave crimes against the Church is the ordination of women. Ms Davis says this is insulting to victims of clerical abuse.
"It is absolutely insulting to victims that they consider that to be progress and that they have put it together with guidelines to consider the proposed ordination of women as serious an offence as sex crimes against children," she said.
But the Vatican says while the ordination of women is a grave crime it is on a different level to the crime of paedophilia.
The Australian Catholic Bishop's Conference issued a statement welcoming the move by the Vatican as another important step towards dealing appropriately with perpetrators.
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