Vatican tightens laws on sex-abuser priests

7/16/2010
NEW YORK TIMES
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, right, and Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor, talk to the media during a briefing to present a new set of norms.
Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi, right, and Monsignor Charles Scicluna, the Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor, talk to the media during a briefing to present a new set of norms.

VATICAN CITY - The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws yesterday making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia.

The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of beleaguered Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests.

The overall document codified procedures that allow the Vatican to try priests accused of child sexual abuse using faster juridical procedures rather than full ecclesiastical trials.

Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the changes showed the church's commitment to tackling child sexual abuse with "rigor and transparency."

Those measures fell short of the hopes of many advocates for victims of priestly abuse, who dismissed them as "tweaking" rather than a bold overhaul.

The new rules do not, for example, hold bishops account-able for abuse by priests on their watch, nor do they require them to report sexual abuse to civil authorities - although less formal "guidelines" issued earlier this year encourage reporting if local law compels it.

But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to ordain women in a list of the "more grave delicts," or offenses, which included pedophilia.

"It is very irritating that they put the increased severity in punishment for abuse and women's ordination at the same level," said Christian Weisner, the spokesman for "We Are Church," a liberal Catholic reform movement founded in 1996 in response to a high-profile sexual abuse case in Austria.

Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl of Washington, a top official in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, called the document a "welcome statement" even as he took pains to praise the role of women in the church.

"The church's gratitude to women cannot be stated strongly enough," he said at a news conference in Washington. "Women offer unique insight, creative abilities, and unstinting generosity at the very heart of the Catholic Church."

Still, the archbishop added, "The Catholic Church through its long and constant teaching holds that ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which cannot be changed despite changing times."

At a news conference at the Vatican, Msgr. Charles J. Scicluna, the Vatican's internal prosecutor in charge of handling sexual abuse cases, explained the change on women's ordination in technical terms. "Sexual abuse and pornography are more grave delicts; they are an egregious violation of moral law," Monsignor Scicluna said. "Attempted ordination of women is grave, but on another level, it is a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacramental orders."

The new document said that a priest who tried to ordain a woman could now be defrocked.

For more than two decades, polls have shown that large majorities of U.S. Catholics favor allowing women to be ordained as priests, despite the lack of support for it among church leaders. The latest poll of U.S. Catholics by the New York Times and CBS News, released in May, showed that 59 percent favored ordaining women, while 33 percent were opposed.

Monsignor Scicluna said that rules on their own could not eradicate priestly abuse but that the church now had better tools to work toward that.

"This gives a signal that we are very, very serious in our commitment to promote safe environments and to offer an adequate response to abuse," he said. "If more changes are needed, they will be made."

In addition to making the faster administrative procedures for disciplining priests the rule, not the exception, the new norms also added possession of child pornography and sexual abuse of mentally disabled adults to the list of grave crimes.

The Vatican also doubled the statute of limitations for abuse cases to 20 years from the victim's 18th birthday.

After that, a priest could be removed from the ministry but not defrocked unless the Vatican lifted the statute of limitations in the case, a right it reserves on a case-by-case basis.

Critics immediately said the revisions did not go far enough.

"Given his authority, Benedict could implement meaningful change," Bishopaccountability.org, which tracks cases of sexual abuse by priests worldwide, said in a statement, referring to Pope Benedict XVI. "He could direct bishops to report every allegation of child sexual abuse to the police, regardless of whether civil law requires them to do so. He could threaten punishment of any bishop or church official who enables or fails to stop a child-molesting priest."