(ITALY)
La Croix International [France]
April 6, 2023
By Massimo Faggioli
What Hans Zollner’s resignation from the pope’s child protection commission tells us about the Vatican’s fight against sexual abuse
The synodal process that Pope Francis has launched to make the Catholic Church more transparent and credible is entering its crucial phase. But his pontificate presently risks losing momentum in its fight against sexual abuse and its promotion of a new culture of accountability. This is the upshot of the recent resignation of Hans Zollner, his fellow Jesuit, from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors (PCPM).
The German priest is a theologian and psychologist. He’s also a leading safeguarding expert and one of the most respected figures in the Church’s response to the clergy sex abuse crisis. That is due largely to the work of the Institute of Anthropology – Interdisciplinary Studies on Human Dignity and Care (former Center for Child Protection), which he directs at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.
Zollner is not the only person to point out problems concerning the PCPM in the last few months. Francis created the commission in 2014 and last September he appointed ten new members to the body. But in the first eight years of its existence the PCPM was in something like an institutional limbo. That changed on March 22 when the pope issued the apostolic constitution Praedicate Evangelium and made the PCPM part of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. However, it’s still not clear what this will mean for the commission’s efficacy and authority within the Roman Curia. However, there are now are more doubts about that than there were one year ago.
The purpose and strategy of the PCPM remains unclear because the very role of the Roman Curia, other Vatican institutions and the legal system per se remain unclear in the current pontificate. The Catholic Church, in fact, has just started to deal with the abuse crisis from a magisterial, theological, and legal point of view. As frustrating or shocking as this might sound, we are still in the early days.
An epoch-making cataclysm
The sex abuse crisis must be seen as one of the epoch-making cataclysmic series of changes in the history of the Church. To give just one example, at the time of the most earth-shattering event in the history of the modern papacy, the collapse of the Papal States in the 19th century culminating with the loss of Rome to the Italian kingdom in 1870, there were more than fifteen different Vatican tribunals exercising the Church’s jurisdiction. There were also the courts of law at the local level. It is not surprising that during his long pontificate (1846-1878), Pius IX eventually had to make reform of the criminal justice system a major priority.
The response to the loss of the Papal States took decades to take shape, between the reform of the Curia in 1908 and Vatican Council II (1962- 65). It will also take decades to deal with the sex abuse crisis. The reaction of the institutional Church has always been slow, because it follows a logic of accumulation and superimposition of new structures on top of old structures – not of replacing old structures with entirely new ones. The Church’s reaction looks even slower now because of the subjugation of all institutions to a mediatization that helps give voice to the victims. This has had mixed effects on the efforts of those who try to bring about change.
Moreover, the abuse crisis has put enormous pressure and strain on the Catholic Church’s legal system. It has raised a number of new issues. For instance, how to balance the presumption of innocence with public fury over the heinous crimes of sexual abuse, especially of minors; how to exercise papal authority to hold bishops accountable and at the same time respect the fact that, from a sacramental point of view, the pope and the bishops are peers, and “resigned” bishops and cardinals are still members of the episcopal college. These are enormous problems that are changing delicate systems that the Church has continuously calibrated over centuries. They are problems that are also destabilizing the ecclesiology of Vatican II. This would be an enormous burden for any pope – and Francis inherited this problem from his predecessors.
Papalism has been increased
But then there are some choices the 86-year-old Jesuit pope has made that must be analyzed for the way they have dealt legally and “politically” with the abuse crisis. His response to the scandal has augmented the rate of papalism in the Catholic Church at the expense of other collegial bodies supposed to help the pope in his ministry. Francis wants to have a synodal Church, but the collegial nature of the work of the Roman Curia and of the College of Cardinals has not improved in the last ten years. As Cardinal Walter Kasper wrote in the preface to a book recently published by Bishop Giuseppe Sciacca, canon lawyer and former secretary of the Apostolic Signatura, “The process of removing bishops from office is a serious matter that the early Church conducted in a synodal way; it cannot be an administrative act, but presupposes a collegial action”.
No matter what Vatican II’s constitution of on the Church (Lumen gentium) says, the bishops now look more and more as franchise managers working on behalf (or by delegation) of the Apostolic See, and not true pastors in virtue of the sacramentality of their episcopal ordination. They also appear tragically weakened in their figure as fathers of their people and friends of their priests. In the Church’s legal system, in the last few years there has also been a twist with the submission of the Roman Curia to the jurisdiction of the Vatican State – a sort of inversion in that relationship between the Vatican City State with respect to the Apostolic See: the Vatican State is supposed to be just a servant, and not the master, of the Apostolic See.
Some of these uncertainties in the legislative activity of Francis’ pontificate are visible in the situation that made Hans Zollner decide to resign. The PCPM does not have a well-defined mandate and mission in the wording of Praedicate Evangelium (art. 78). More than a year after its publication, there is no clarity on the relationship between the PCPM and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith. In his statement explaining his reasons for resigning, Zollner said he was “unaware of any regulations that govern the relationship between the commission and the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith”. There is no clarity on the relationship between the PCPM president and the cardinal-prefect of the doctrinal office, nor on the relationship between the PCPM president and the same commission’s secretary.
New problems for the Vatican commission
Praedicate Evangelium cannot by fiat solve a problem that was evident from the start. Marie Collins resigned from the commission in 2017 because of what she called the doctrinal office’s “resistance” to its work. It is still unclear how the commission and the dicastery will work together. Then there are new problems. Other prominent former members of the PCPM, such as Baroness Hollins and Sr. Jane Bertelsen, have made their concerns public about the remit of the PCPM. They, too, have questioned the wisdom of placing the commission within the Vatican’s doctrinal office.
However, instead of dealing with those pressing concerns, the PCPM is now engaging in new – and more than daunting – tasks. The PCPM president, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, recently revealed one of them when he quoted a message from the pope (dated March 8) to participants at the Second Latin American Congress on the prevention of abuse, which took place in Asuncion, Paraguay. “He [Francis] recalled how the Pontifical Commission or the Protection of Minors has the role of overseeing the proper implementation of Vos estis lux mundi, so that abused persons have clear and accessible paths to seek justice,” O’Malley said.
But, so far, the PCPM has refused to comment on individual cases, such as that involving the 78-year-old Cardinal Jean-Pierre Ricard. The now- retired archbishop of Bordeaux (France) was — and still appears to be — a member of the very Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith of which the PCPM is part. He admitted last November 2022 that he committed “reprehensible” acts of a sexual nature against a 14-year-old girl some 35 years earlier. (Ricard revealed this after the statute of limitations had expired according to the French penal code.)
More importantly, canon lawyers have doubts about the PCPM’s competence and authority to “oversee” the implementation of Vos estis for the entire Church, let alone the fact that this seems to have created further legal chaos. This exposes the PCPM to a kind of liability, potentially from anyone in the world, that was not there before. There is no doubt that Pope Francis has raised the awareness throughout the Church about the plague of sex abuse. And he has tried to implement courageous institutional and legal reforms. Cardinal O’Malley has also brought ecclesiastical credibility to Francis’ reform efforts, and in key moments he has forcefully helped the pope adjust his message (like during the papal trip to Chile in 2018).
But at this time, it’s clear that these efforts need corrections. The “papal patriotism” that has made many Catholics defend Francis from the unprecedented attacks against his legitimacy (included an attempt to unseat him with an instrumental use of the case of former cardinal Theodore McCarrick) cannot ignore the legal and institutional inconsistencies that the Vatican response to the abuse crisis still shows. The papacy now lives and dies by public and media events, but the Church also needs a systematic and consistent approach to the role of the law and its institutions.