Cardinal Desmond
Connell, the former archbishop of Dublin, told the Murphy commission in
Ireland that mental reservation was deceiving someone without telling
a lie. He said it is permissible to use "an ambiguous expression realising
that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of
whatever it may be."
There is an exquisite
piece of mental reservation in a recent announcement from the Vatican.According to Vatican Radio,
"The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors presented a five
point plan to the Pope and his closest advisors at this week's meeting,
including the establishment of a 'new judicial section' to examine all cases of
bishops accused of abusing their office and failing to report crimes committed
by priests in their care."
The ambiguous expression in this case
is "failing to report crimes" because it does not say to whom the
bishops should have reported. Nearly everyone would understand the expression
to mean reporting to the police. That is not what the Vatican means. It means
reporting to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in every case and
only sometimes to the police.
As the Holy See told
the Irish foreign minister in 2011, bishops are the governors of their own
diocese, and so far as the church is concerned, the only restraint on them is
canon law. Bishops can only be put on trial before this new tribunal for
breaching canon law. A bishop who fails to report credible allegations of child
sexual abuse by clergy to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is in
breach of canon law because that obligation is set out in the decree Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.
Likewise, canon law
in the United States since 2002, and for the rest of the world since 2010,
requires bishops to comply with domestic civil reporting laws. A failure to do
so constitutes a breach of canon law. The recently resigned bishops -- Archbishop John Nienstedt and
Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché of St. Paul-Minneapolis and Bishop
Robert Finn of Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., who was convicted
by a Missouri court of failing to report a priest's possession
of child pornography -- could be brought before the new tribunal for failing to
comply with civil laws on reporting as required by the norms approved in
December 2002 by the Holy See for the United States.
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Very few jurisdictions in the world
have comprehensive reporting laws. Most have reporting laws for children at
risk, that is, where they are under the age of 18, but very few have reporting
laws that apply to historical abuse, that is, where the abused person is now an
adult. In the United States, half the states have such laws and half do not.
The United Kingdom, Germany, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Canada do not
have them. In 2014 and 2015, the Italian and Polish Catholic bishops'
conferences announced that they would not be reporting child sex abuse offenses
by clergy to the police because their civil laws did not require it. Their
stance is consistent with canon law.
In Australia, only two out of the eight
states and territories require the reporting of historical abuse. Figures
produced at the Victorian parliamentary inquiry in Australia suggest that
historical abuse amounts to more than 99 percent of all complaints. The same
inquiry found that of the 611 complaints of child sexual abuse in the four
Victorian dioceses between 1996 and 2012, not one of them had been reported by
the church to the civil authorities.
This was
understandable because prior to 2014, there was no requirement under Victorian
law to report any abuse, whether of children at risk or historical abuse. And
the bishops on ordination had sworn an oath to obey all ecclesiastical laws,
which in this case meant not reporting these crimes to the police in accordance
with the pontifical secret imposed by Pope Paul VI's Secreta Continere and Pope John Paul II's Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela.
In those
jurisdictions without such reporting laws, unless a bishop walks into a
priest's bedroom and finds him in flagrante delicto with
a minor, the pontifical secret prevents him from reporting any knowledge of or
allegations about such crimes to the police. If he reports the matter to the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he has complied with canon law and
cannot be charged with "abuse of office," despite the fact that he has
covered up these crimes by not reporting them to the police.
On two occasions now,
the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child and the Committee against Torture demanded that the Holy See
abolish the pontifical secret for child sexual abuse and order
mandatory reporting under canon law, irrespective of whether there are civil
reporting laws or not. On Sept. 26, 2014, the Holy See rejected the
request.
Many media reports describe the setting
up of this tribunal as a breakthrough. There is no breakthrough. The announcement
does not do away with the pontifical secret and does not extend reporting
requirements to the civil authorities. In many cases of cover-up by bishops,
there will be no abuse of office because the cover-up has been required by
canon law, as the announcements by the Italian and Polish bishops attest.
The pope has always
had jurisdiction to dismiss or punish bishops like Nienstedt, Piché and Finn,
who have breached canon law. He even has jurisdiction to dismiss them even
where they have not breached canon law, as the case of the Australian
Bishop William Morris shows.
This announcement is being dressed up
as a measure to protect children when all it is doing is setting up a tribunal
that would ensure that bishops accused of breaching canon law have the right to
be heard. It is another example of clericalism creating smoke and mirrors to
give the impression that better protections are being provided for children
when the people being looked after are the bishops. The real breakthrough will
happen when the Holy See complies with the demands of the United Nations.
[Kieran Tapsell is
the author of Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's
Secret and Child Sexual Abuse.]
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