VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Union of Catholic Asian News (UCA News) [Hong Kong]
December 6, 2024
By Jean D'Cunha
There is a need for impactful revision and action on clerical sexual abuse under canon law
In 2021, the Vatican announced revisions to the Code of Canon Law’s Penal Sanctions in the Church — which includes clerical sexual abuse (CSA) and other crimes — considered the most profound, following much deliberation and earlier patchy reforms.
The reforms seek to restore justice, reform offenders, and repair scandals. They stem primarily from survivors, backed by rights-based movements, media and national justice systems demanding decisive Church action.
Church experts, too, have been canvassing more substantive changes to earlier reforms.
However, three years after the last revisions, CSA continues with impunity, especially in the Global South. Theologically, sexual abuse is defined as a sin against God and humans (moral failing), and not a crime committed in a society (legal concept).
Sin is a matter of conscience that compromises the relationship with God. It can be forgiven through repentance and sacramental absolution and addressed via spiritual and psychological rehabilitation, together with more serious church-ordained penalties, as needed.
Theologically, sin is defined by God and ecclesiastical authorities and incurs God’s justice, while governments, civil codes, and human justice mediate crime. Church laws separate ecclesial and civil processes, and hierarchies cooperate with civil authorities within specific parameters.
Church constructions of CSA as a sin, and not a crime, limit the efficacy of the revisions despite their far-reaching changes. This demands further theological and practical re-hauling in consultation with women and survivors.
Firstly, per the reforms, sexual abuse includes all non-consensual sexual acts, including rape of minors and adults, but is framed as an offense against the decalogue’s sixth commandment — you shall not commit adultery (marital infidelity), which is unacceptable.
It defies logic to understand how CSA — committed by unmarried men against boys, girls, men, and women — is adultery, notwithstanding copious theological explanations. The law needs to clearly define sexual abuse as a crime, mandate hierarchs to report it to civil authorities, and fully cooperate with them.
Further, the definitions of rape or the gravity of abuse are unclear. Sexual abuse and rape should be defined clearly, aiming to cover all victims, drawing from provisions of progressive national laws.
Reforms recognize that adults too can be abused by clerics and others who misuse their positions of power over adults and not just minors. The revisions now address victimized adults.
However, the law does not explicitly use the term adult. In differentiating it from minors, it refers to “a person who habitually has imperfect use of reason or one to whom the law recognizes equal protection.” The term adult should be defined to accept the legal age of majority in national laws.
Further, the current definition of adult needs expanded indicators of vulnerability, such as a person’s imperfect use of reason — habitual, transient, or intermittent — stemming from unsoundness of mind, intoxication, a drugged condition, physical disability, or chronic illness.
Recognizing abuse of power in sexual abuse, revisions expand the typology of punishable violations. “Grooming” of minors or adults, for instance, is punishable as a practice that sexual predators deploy to nurture trust with those they intend to abuse sexually.
However, grooming is undefined in these revisions and criminalized only in relation to pornography, which is very limited. It must be explicitly defined and its criminalization extended to sexual acts beyond pornography.
Revisions also demand that clerics must obey civil reporting laws and can be removed from office or punished for covering up sexual abuse within the Church’s ambit and for non-cooperation with civil authorities, barring knowledge under the seal of confession.
However, clerics are not mandated to report crimes to civil authorities and hence there are no related penalties. This is justified by sensitivities where the Church is under attack or where there is a conflict between national privacy laws and universal mandatory reporting — regardless of the possibility of introducing discretionary clauses or making exceptions.
Even the June 2022 Vatican document Vademecum, which detailed the procedures to implement the revised law, hedges on reporting CSA to civil authorities.
It says: “Even in [CSA] cases where there is no explicit legal obligation to do so, ecclesiastical authorities should make a report to the competent civil authorities if this is considered necessary to protect the person involved or other minors from the danger of further criminal acts.”
The conditionality and discretion in this provision provide hierarchs with an escape clause that prevents reporting the crime to the civil authorities, justifiable on the grounds that the offender is no longer a threat to the victim or other minors.
Moreover, these revisions exclude survivor-sensitive codes of conduct during the canon law process, holistic rehabilitation, accompaniment, and compensation to victims, despite their intent — of restoring justice, offender reform, and repair of scandal.
Impactful revision and action on sexual abuse under canon law demands:
• Active consultations with survivors and feminist theologians in future reforms of canon law on Church-related sexual abuse, that among other things deem church-related sexual abuse as a crime and clearly define earlier mentioned concepts.
• Promoting humane conceptions of sexuality, masculinity/femininity and other gender identities, encouraging open discussions on this; reforming canon law to delink celibacy from the priesthood.
• Raising consciousness on revised provisions on sexual abuse, targeted at different segments of the Church through archdiocesan and parish mechanisms.
• Raising consciousness on speaking up against Church-related abuse and reporting complaints to Church and civil authorities.
• Ensuring that canonical processes on sexual abuse have human rights-based survivor-centered codes of conduct at all stages (reporting, investigations, hearings, final verdict and thereafter), and ensuring holistic rehabilitation, accompaniment and compensation to victims.
• Mandating clerics to directly report Church-related sexual abuse to civil authorities or establishing related committees, with penalties for religious superiors overseeing committees, for not reporting. There can be discretionary clauses where the Church is imperilled, and exceptions where national laws conflict with canon law, or any other like situation.
*Dr. Jean D’Cunha is a gender expert with a continuing body of work on women’s labor migration and the links between gender, climate change and migration. She worked with UN Women in senior technical and management positions worldwide and retired as the senior global advisor on international migration and descent. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official editorial position of UCA News.