Groups representing the victims of pedophile priests have reacted angrily to a Catholic Church edict to newly appointed bishops that they are “not necessarily” responsible for reporting allegations of child abuse to the police.
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Keith Porteous Wood, NSS executive director, commented: “It is unfortunately no surprise that these guidelines encourage bishops not to report suspected abuse, rather than obligating them to do so as the United Nations recommended specifically to the Vatican in 2014”.
The monsignor, a psychoanalyst and a consultant to the pontifical councils for the family and for health care ministry, “does not say anything new or different from what has been said up until now by relevant church institutions”, Father Lombardi said.
Indeed, a church official familiar with the commission on abuse said it was the committee’s position that reporting abuse to civil authorities was a “moral obligation, whether the civil law requires it or not”.
“What intrigues me about [Francis] as a man is that he’s a work in progress – he shows a great capacity to change”, Jason Berry, who has written about the Church, said in a Frontline interview after the Pope’s first visit with survivors.
An explosive new report is making audacious claims about the Catholic Church. It also required background checks and training in child protection for church employees and required dioceses facing allegations made about priests or other church workers to alert authorities, conduct an investigation and remove the accused person from duty.
The guidelines fly in the face of what Pope Francis has been trying to accomplish with the abuse scandals.
After spelling out mandated church procedures concerning such crimes, he also underlined the church’s call to bishops to follow local laws. However, a spokesman for the group Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests is criticizing the Bishop’s apology, calling it a public relations move.
He said reporting is a matter for victims and their families instead.
According to Crux, the Catholic Church has a new message for its clergy when it comes to sexual abuse: Keep it quiet.
“The kind of days when the Church saw itself as extra-territorial – somehow beyond the law and that this was something we could deal with in-house – those days are long gone and the Church and bishops and Church authorities simply have no excuse whatsoever not to report these matters”, he said. If a bishop is made aware of a specific case involving clergy and the molestation of a child, urging the family to report the crime to police simply isn’t enough.
Australian Catholic commentator Paul Collins said it was possible the bishops’ training course was designed for poorer countries where the Church believes police cannot always be trusted.
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