VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
New York Times [New York NY]
October 29, 2024
By Elisabetta Povoledo
[See also the text of the PCPM report.]
The report is intended to assess efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to safeguard minors and others. Advocates for survivors called it an exercise in obfuscation.
Ten years after it was first established, a Vatican commission on clerical sexual abuse issued its first report on Tuesday, a limited step in self-accounting by some bishops that was immediately criticized by victims’ advocates as being toothless and lacking independent verification.
Since the clerical abuse scandal erupted into the mainstream media two decades ago, the church has struggled to put in place effective measures around the world to end abuse and hold the church hierarchy accountable when it was involved in covering up cases.
The Vatican group, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, was formed in 2014 to advise Pope Francis on how best to protect minors and vulnerable adults from sexual predators among the clergy. Last year, Francis also tasked the commission with verifying that countries were following a new church law that set out rules for reporting and combating clerical sexual abuse.
The report issued Tuesday was the first time the Vatican had made public the results of its efforts to improve safeguarding policies and procedures.
The commission found that some of the countries demonstrated “a clear commitment to safeguarding.” Others lagged behind, in some cases showing “a troubling” lack of support for victims of abuse. It also called for better disciplinary measures as well as economic compensation for survivors.
At a news conference at the Vatican on Tuesday, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the president of the commission, described the report as a “snapshot of the journey of conversion that we have been on” toward “a transparent and accountable ministry.” But there is still “much to be done,” he said. In some cases, only a few of a country’s dioceses participated.
Leading advocates for survivors of clergy abuse said the report did not provide the transparency that they have long demanded from the church.
“All they’re doing is collecting information from highly prejudiced sources,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, who has tracked clergy abuse over decades as a co-director of the BishopAccountability.org website.
“I think this report will simply add more smoke and obfuscation around the church’s global handling of abuse,” she said. “It’s going to create the impression that they’re now protecting children when that is absolutely not the case.”
Other critics likened the bishops’ reports to the commission to mere homework being presented to the teacher. They said the laws did not go far enough, demanding zero tolerance for clerics who abuse as well as superiors who covered it up. Others said compliance was still weak.
“I can appreciate Pope Francis’s voice,” Francesco Zanardi, founder of Italian survivors group Rete L’Abuso (the Abuse Network) said. But many of his bishops “don’t listen in the end.”
He called the report “a house of cards built on sand.”
Since its inception, the commission has faced strong criticism over its mandate, capabilities and funding, with several high-profile members quitting in protest, including two survivors of clerical abuse who had accused the Vatican of stonewalling.
Last year, the Rev. Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit who is arguably the Catholic Church’s leading expert on anti-abuse efforts, also quit, excoriating the commission for failing to provide “responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency.”
On Tuesday, Cardinal O’Malley said the report was part of a journey, from a “dark period” in the Church’s recent past when “Church leaders failed abuse victims.” The report, he hoped was the beginning of a new chapter of uniform standards. “We believe change is taking place,” he said.
It had some key recommendations. It said that the church had to better discipline clerics who had been found guilty of abuse or a coverup but had not been removed, allowing them to cause “additional harm.”
“Such a reality reveals the need for a disciplinary or administrative proceeding that provides an efficient path for resignation or removal from office,” the report stated. And it reiterated “the importance of compensation” for survivors of abuse, but also “public apologies.”
The report stated it was “not intended as an audit of the incidence of abuse within Church contexts,” because of “time and capacity constraints” and “a lack of reliable data in some countries, most notably reliable statistics on the number of children who are sexually abused.” Instead, the focus had been on the policies, procedures, and mechanisms to keep children and vulnerable adults safe.
In some cases it listed challenges to putting in place safeguarding practices, like “cultural barriers to reporting abuse,” the “prioritization of the Church’s reputation over survivor support” or “lack of cultural sensitization to the phenomenon of abuse.”
The report also examined the Vatican’s doctrinal office in charge of dealing with abuse cases and called for greater transparency, specifying that it could shorten the length of canonical trials; work more efficiently with local authorities and be less secretive.
It also called on those who work in seminaries to have adequate training on safeguarding and to ensure that there is a complete psychological assessment of those aspiring to become priests.
A Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said Tuesday that other reports would be issued annually.
Victims’ advocates said the findings had been too broad.
Ms. Barrett Doyle, who had not read the report yet but knew of some of its content, said it was “absurd” for the commission not to “assess the church’s performance on individual abuse cases.”
“When it comes to the church’s response to abuse, the devil literally is in the details in the individual cases. So the remit of the commission renders it toothless from the start,” she said.
Every bishops’ conference will present reports. Until now, responses have not been uniform. Only a dozen or so countries have done deep dives into their archives, examining abuse in past decades. And only a handful of countries, among them the United States, have been issuing annual reports on clerical abuse cases.
Juan Carlos Cruz, a member of the commission as well as a survivor of abuse, said in an interview that the report was by necessity incomplete, and was an initial document for the commission to build on and develop. It was not, he said, “a P.R. exercise,” otherwise he wouldn’t be a part of it.
“We talk so much about transparency and accountability and yet the data is so murky,” he said, adding that there were significant gaps in gathering information, which he said would be addressed. “I understand that it won’t satisfy everybody and it won’t satisfy survivors,” he said.
“It’s the first one, and it’s a start,” he said.