May you forgive them, father

By Martin Scicluna
Times of Malta
February 19, 2014

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20140219/opinion/May-you-forgive-them-father.507394

Pope Francis has spoken movingly of “the Church as a field hospital after battle. Our first duty is to tend the wounded”

The United Nations Committee on Rights of the Child has recently delivered a swingeing report on the systemic and long-standing sexual abuse of children by the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, the committee undermined the impact of this important report by straying beyond its terms of reference to areas like women’s rights, abortion and contraception, allowing those in the Church so minded to cast doubt on the credibility of the report.

This is a pity because the main thrust of the committee’s 16-page report contains a damning indictment of the Vatican’s “systematic” adoption of policies allowing priests to abuse children sexually. The report urges the Holy See to “immediately remove” all clergy who are known or suspected of having abused minors and to report them to the civil authorities.

It also states that it should hand over its records on abuse of tens of thousands of children so that the culprits, as well as “those who concealed their crimes”, are held accountable.

The committee “is gravely concerned that the Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices which have led to the continuation of the abuse by, and the impunity of, the perpetrators”.

In a searing passage in the report, it adds the following: “The committee is particularly concerned that in dealing with allegations of child sexual abuse, the Holy See has consistently placed the preservation of the reputation of the Church and the protection of the perpetrators above the children’s best interests”.

The report goes on to say that “some of the rules of Canon Law are not in conformity with the provisions of the UN’s own Universal Charter of Human Rights, in particular those relating to children’s rights to be protected against discrimination, violence and all forms of sexual exploitation and sexual abuse”.

It also highlights an institutionalised response to cases of child sex abuse whereby local law may have been circumvented in favour of Canon Law, which the same UN committee report shows to be flawed and having shortcomings.

We saw this only too clearly in Malta when allegations first surfaced of sexual abuse of young boys by members of the clergy at a Church-run Home at Santa Venera. The then archbishop’s first reaction was to set up his own in-house investigation. It was only years later, by which time the victims had filed their own police report, that the same suspects – who had, extraordinarily, been exonerated by the Church’s Commission of Inquiry – were arraigned and subsequently convicted of sexual crimes against the boys.

There have been cases of paedophile priests all over the world from Austria to Ireland and from Australia to America and points in between. However, nobody within the Church appears to have asked why Catholic priests should be so susceptible to this crime.

The Catholic author, John Cornwell, who had once been destined for the priesthood and spent seven years in a seminary, has written an absorbing book, The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, in which he lays much of the blame for child sex abuse by priests on the practice of confession.

His thesis is that confession has been one of the causes of the sex abuse scandals that have convulsed the Church and that the link between confession and child abuse appears to have escaped the Church authorities. How many priests used confession to groom children for sexual abuse is still apparently undergoing investigation.

Cornwell writes from personal experience, as well as drawing on history going back to Mediaeval times and the testimony by other victims of clerical abuse. His trust in clerical piety was shaken when, in his teens, he was sexually propositioned by the priest hearing his confession. He did not report what had happened but other boys, similarly approached, did, and the offending priest was eventually removed from the seminary only to be appointed chaplain of a boys’ junior school.

This decision by the priest’s then bishop, placing him in an environment where he could continue with his illicit activities, was typical of the Catholic authorities’ connivance in child abuse and bears all the hallmarks of the way our archbishop handled the case of Fr Godwin Scerri who had escaped from Canada to evade police arrest on charges that he had abused a 12 -year-old boy for four years and was immediately placed in St Joseph’s Home for Boys, where he went on to commit more crimes against young boys.

The Vatican delegation which went to Geneva a month ago to give detailed responses to the UN Committee was led by Archbishop Silvano Tomasi and included Malta’s Auxiliary Bishop Charles Scicluna, who during a 10-year period covered by the report had been the Promoter of Justice, or chief prosecutor, in the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith responsible for adjudicating all reported cases of child abuse in the Catholic Church.

While Mgr Scicluna has rightly forborne to comment on the report, it is clear that he had played a prominent part at the topmost levels of the Church for 10 years in this whole sorry saga.

More pertinently in the local context — given the UN report’s justifiably scathing remarks about the Church being more concerned at preserving its reputation above the children’s best interests — on his promotion to auxiliary bishop he was confronted with the key question of whether the Maltese Church should compensate the 11 victims of the sexual crimes at St Joseph’s Home. Having, while chief prosecutor, argued that the victims deserved financial compensation, urging the Curia to set up a ‘Victim Solidarity Fund’ which could go beyond the demands of damages granted by law “if need be financially”, he then reneged on this advice arguing that it was “unfair” to make the Church liable.

Unfair he may think it is, but moral justice demands that the 11 victims should be compensated, including financially. The Church had direct control over the four priests who caused the criminal injuries to the 11 victims. It was the Church, through the Missionary Society of St Paul, that appointed them to their positions of trust, which they then horribly abused.

The Maltese Church is utterly accountable. It is therefore ultimately the Church that should bear legal liability for the paedophile crimes that were committed in the home since it had day-to-day responsibility for what happened there. This must in all justice include financial compensation, as the auxiliary bishop originally proposed.

Mgr Scicluna experienced at first hand in Geneva the contempt in which the United Nations held the Catholic Church on this issue. Pope Francis has spoken movingly of “the Church as a field hospital after battle. Our first duty is to tend the wounded”. Is the Maltese Church to stand back from its fundamental responsibilities in this case?

It would be hypocritical, demonstrate a gross lack of charity and commit a cynical act of injustice if it continued to resist pressure to pay financial compensation to the 11 victims for the harm they suffered as children at the hands of the Church.

Archbishop Paul Cremona should think again and settle the matter immediately out of court.