WARSAW (POLAND)
Associated Press
June 14, 2019
By Monika Scislowska
The Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, met with Poland’s Catholic bishops on Friday to share his experience in tracking crimes, after the Polish Church admitted knowing about hundreds of cases over the years where priests abused minors.
Scicluna attended the bishops’ plenary session Friday in Walbrzych, southwestern Poland, for a discussion about “protecting children and youths,” the Episcopate said.
Bishop Piotr Libera tweeted that Scicluna’s remarks were “extremely interesting.”
Scicluna told Poland’s Catholic news agency KAI that he would like to “encourage Poland’s bishops to implement the very good guidance points that they themselves adopted” in 2013.
He later told a news conference it was not enough to have rules but “we need to implement what the documents say” and people in parishes should know who to turn to in the Church when they suspect abuse.
Scicluna urged every person aware of a cover-up to report it to higher church authorities or in the case of high-ranking bishops, to the papal nuncio in Poland.
Scicluna, a Maltese archbishop, and expert in church law, has been instrumental in revealing facts about priestly sex abuse and cover-up by Chilean church leaders for Pope Francis. In February at the Vatican, he gave a tutorial on preventing sex abuse to a summit of church leaders convened by Francis in reaction to the global sex abuse and cover-up crisis that has undermined credibility in the Church.
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