VATICAN CITY (CNS): The Vatican has revised its procedures for handling priestly sex abuse cases, streamlining disciplinary measures, extending the statute of limitations and defining child pornography as an act of sexual abuse of a minor.
Vatican officials said the changes allowed the Church to deal with such abuse more rapidly and effectively, often through dismissal of the offending cleric from the priesthood.
The Vatican also updated its list of the “more grave crimes” against Church law, called “delicta graviora”, including for the first time the “attempted sacred ordination of a woman”. In such an act, it said, the cleric and the woman involved are automatically excommunicated, and the cleric can also be dismissed from the priesthood.
Vatican officials emphasised that simply because women’s ordination was treated in the same document as priestly sex abuse did not mean the two acts were somehow equivalent in the eyes of the Church.
“There are two types of ‘delicta graviora’: those concerning the celebration of the sacraments, and those concerning morals. The two types are essentially different and their gravity is on different levels,” an official of the Vatican’s doctrinal congregation Monsignor Charles Scicluna.
Sexual abuse of a minor by a priest was added to the classification of “delicta graviora” in 2001, and at that time the Vatican established norms to govern the handling of such cases, which were reserved to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The norms affect how Church law treats sex abuse cases; civil law deals with the crime separately.
The latest revisions, approved by Pope Benedict XVI on May 21 and released July 15, mostly codify practices that have been implemented through special permissions granted over the past nine years and make them part of universal law.
The norms on sexual abuse of minors by priests now stipulate:
– The Church law’s statute of limitations on accusations of sexual abuse has been extended, from 10 years after the alleged victim’s 18th birthday to 20 years. For several years, Vatican officials have been routinely granting exceptions to the 10-year statute of limitations. Exceptions to the 20-year limit will be possible.
– Use of child pornography now falls under the category of clerical sexual abuse of minors, and offenders can be dismissed from the priesthood. This norm applies to “the acquisition, possession, or distribution by a cleric of pornographic images of minors under the age of 14, for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using whatever technology”.
– Sexual abuse of adults with mental disability will be considered equivalent to abuse of minors.
In 2003, two years after promulgating the Vatican’s norms on priestly sex abuse, Pope John Paul II gave the doctrinal congregation a number of special faculties to streamline the handling of such cases. The new revisions incorporate those changes, which were already in practice, including:
– In the most serious and clear cases of sexual abuse of minors by priests, the doctrinal congregation may proceed directly to laicise a priest without going through an ecclesiastical trial. In these instances, the final decision for dismissal from the clerical state and dispensation from the obligations of celibacy is made by the pope.
– The doctrinal congregation can dispense with using the formal judicial process in Church law in favour of the “extrajudicial process”. In effect, this allows a bishop to remove an accused priest from ministry without going through a formal trial.
– The doctrinal congregation’s competency in such cases means it has the right to judge cardinals, patriarchs and bishops as well as priests.
