VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News) [Hong Kong]
October 21, 2024
By Kieran Tapsell, Pearls and Irritations
Pope Francis urges cooperation on child abuse cases, but the Vatican’s lack of transparency contradicts this
Pope Francis has called upon Church authorities to cooperate with civil authorities in relation to child sexual abuse by Church personnel. But when it comes to the Vatican cooperating, it is a different story.
On Sept. 28, while in Belgium, Pope Francis is reported to have said: “‘There is no room for abuse in the church. I ask everyone, don’t cover up abuse! Evil must not be hidden, it must be in the open … so that the abuser is judged, whether they be a layman or a laywoman, a priest or a bishop, that they be judged. The word of God is clear.”
If the word of God is clear, Pope Francis is not listening to it. The Holy See only publishes its disciplinary decisions when the allegations are in the public domain.
On Dec. 17, 2017, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse published its Final Report. Its recommendation 16.10, was that the Holy See should abolish the pontifical secret over clergy sexual abuse. Its recommendation 16.16 was that the Holy See publish in a timely manner its decisions in disciplinary cases and the reasons for them.
The Final Report of the 2021 French Independent Commission on Sexual Abuse in the Catholic Church made a similar recommendation.
The Australian Royal Commission accepted that it may be appropriate to suppress information leading to the identification of the victim.
On Dec. 19, 2019, Pope Francis, to his credit, abolished the pontifical secret, but retained what he called “office confidentiality” for disciplinary proceedings. His Instruction stated that “office confidentiality” did not prevent compliance with civil reporting laws.
On Feb. 26, 2020, the Holy See responded to the Royal Commission’s recommendations 16.10 and 16.16. It stated that the pontifical secret had now been abolished but that “the publication of decisions in individual cases needs to be evaluated in light of the duty to protect the good name, image and privacy of all persons involved.”
“All persons involved” includes the perpetrators and not just the victims.
Since 2020, the only published decisions in individual cases seem to be those where the scandals have already been exposed in the media, for example, the 449-page report on Cardinal McCarrick. When the Vatican hands down a disciplinary decision, it is forwarded to the priest’s bishop and is kept in the diocesan secret archive. Neither the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops receives copies of the decisions, nor does the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference.
Since 2010, the Holy See has required Church authorities to comply with civil reporting laws on child sexual abuse. Not all countries have them, but even when they do, a State prosecution may not occur. Many victim-survivors do not want to be involved in the trauma of a criminal prosecution, and the State will not force them to give evidence. Victim survivors often prefer the offense to be dealt with by a disciplinary tribunal.
On Jan. 17, 2014, Pope Francis’ representative before the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child, Archbishop Tomasi, said that since 2005, more than 3,400 credible allegations of sexual abuse of minors had been referred to the Holy See. As a result, 848 clerics had been dismissed and other disciplinary measures had been applied in 2,552 other cases.
Pope Francis claims that he imposes “zero tolerance” for child sexual abuse. Zero tolerance is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a policy of giving the most severe punishment possible to every person who commits a crime or breaks a rule.”
The maximum punishment under canon law is dismissal from the priesthood, and that is what the Australian Royal Commission recommended in all cases of child sexual abuse.
According to the dictionary definition, Pope Francis’ tolerance is not zero but 75 percent. There may be good reasons why some of these priests have not been dismissed, but unless the Holy See publishes its reasons no one will ever know.
Pope Francis was required under the Convention on the Rights of the Child to provide another report to the United Nations Committee for the Rights of the Child in 2019, at which time he could have produced the Church’s current statistics. He has not done so.
Pope Francis has told bishops to cooperate with civil authorities in matters of child sexual abuse, but when it comes to his providing documentary evidence to civil inquiries, he refuses to do so. He has refused requests by the Australian Royal Commission, the English Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, and the Polish State Commission on Paedophilia for Vatican documents relating to abuse within these countries’ jurisdictions.
Furthermore, Canon 489 requires local Church authorities to destroy evidence of the abuse after 10 years. The Vatican will still have the evidence, but it will not exist in the local jurisdiction to be subpoenaed.
It did not take long after the abolition of the pontifical secret for the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith to interpret the concept of “office confidentiality” to exclude publication of disciplinary judgments and their reasons.
Matteo Visioli, a former undersecretary of the Dicastery, in an article published in 2020, stated that the publication of the entire text of the penal decree or sentence would make it impossible to sufficiently protect the confidentiality of possible witnesses.
Visioli must have been aware that the Roman Rota publishes redacted reports of annulment cases for the guidance of canon lawyers. The names of witnesses and parties are anonymized. Family Law Courts in many countries publish anonymized reports of family law cases for similar reasons.
Visioli then says that office confidentiality, despite not enjoying “the rigor” of the pontifical secret, “intends to seriously protect the confidentiality of the acts, the good reputation of the persons involved, and the good of the Church.” Witnesses, and in appropriate cases perpetrators, can be protected by redaction and anonymization. The reputation of the Church cannot, so the solution is to publish nothing unless the press has got hold of it.
The “good of the Church” was precisely the mindset behind the imposition of the pontifical secret and the cover-up imposed by canon law from 1922 to 2019.
Visioli argues that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not have the authority under canon law to publish judgments in disciplinary cases, presumably because of “office confidentiality.” Even if Visioli is correct, Pope Francis is an absolute monarch when it comes to canon law. He can change it with the stroke of his pen.
Pope Francis says all the right things, but the only conclusion from the above is that he does not practice what he preaches.
He is correct in stating that evil must not be hidden, but he is sitting on boxes of it in the Vatican. He has refused to produce relevant documents to independent inquiries and has failed to publish the decisions of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the canonical courts, as recommended by two independent inquiries.
*Kieran Tapsell is a retired Australian civil lawyer and the author of Potiphar’s Wife: The Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse (2014). An updated second edition will be published early in 2025. This article was first published by Pearls and Irritations and is republished by UCA News with permission. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.