The world’s news media reported a few days ago on a supposedly-groundbreaking announcement: Pope Francis made a change to canon law that concerns reporting abuse and cover-up of abuse within the Roman Catholic Church. While the change he’s made sounds good in theory, and does have at least one positive feature, the truth of the matter is that it’s not much of a reform. The Associated Press reports via the Religion News Service on the Vatican’s announced changes (Archive.Is cached article):
Pope Francis issued a groundbreaking law Thursday (May 9) requiring all Catholic priests and nuns around the world to report clergy sexual abuse and cover-up by their superiors to church authorities, in a new effort to hold the Catholic hierarchy accountable for failing to protect their flocks.
The new church law provides whistleblower protections for anyone making a report and requires all dioceses around the world to have a system in place to receive the claims confidentially. And it outlines procedures for conducting preliminary investigations when the accused is a bishop, cardinal or religious superior.…
The law makes the world’s 415,000 Catholic priests and 660,000 religious sisters mandated reporters. That means they are required to inform church authorities when they learn or have “well-founded motives to believe” that a cleric or sister has engaged in sexual abuse of a minor, sexual misconduct with an adult, possession of child pornography — or that a superior has covered up any of those crimes.
The problem here is that this new canon law still keeps everything “in house,” or inside the Church. It explicitly treats cover-ups as something to be reported and investigated, but at the very same time, it enables cover-ups by not involving local secular authorities. This “change” doesn’t open up transparency; if anything, it only intensifies opacity.
The Vatican’s unwillingness to involve local authorities is an old whine:
The Vatican has long argued that different legal systems in different countries make a universal reporting law impossible, and that imposing one could endanger the church in places where Catholics are a persecuted minority.
It’s true Catholicism and Christianity generally are oppressed in some places, but that’s not true everywhere … far from it! This is not, in fact, a valid excuse for not imposing a universal reporting rule. Such a rule could certainly be written with exceptions for particular regions where it might truly endanger people. So pardon me if I don’t buy into this objection.
There is one aspect of this which is positive, although it has possible pitfalls:
The new procedures call for any claim of sexual misconduct or cover-up against a bishop, religious superior or Eastern rite patriarch to be reported to the Holy See and the metropolitan bishop, who is a regular diocesan bishop also responsible for a broader geographic area than his dioceses alone.
By the same token, archbishops/metropolitans would be investigated by the Vatican. Moving investigations one step above the reported perpetrator is an improvement, to be sure — technically, prior to this change, a bishop would be responsible for investigating himself, which is untenable — but even with whistleblower protections, reporters in Church ranks could still end up at the mercy of those they’ve turned in. So they’d still have to step carefully.
Overall, I have to say I’m unimpressed. These new rules could have been so much better had they mandated reporting to police or other local secular authorities … but let’s face it, the R.C. Church just isn’t having it; thus the Pope just hammered the lid back down on the Church’s handling of abuse.
Photo credit: Catholic Church England & Wales, via Flickr.
