So it was striking on Thursday to hear two of the conference’s opening speakers use the term crimes in no uncertain terms—a marked change from Vatican rhetoric of the past. “An essential aspect of the exercise of stewardship in these cases is the proper interface with civil jurisdiction. We are talking about misconduct that is also a crime in all civil jurisdictions,” said Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who spent a decade as the Vatican’s top investigator on abuse cases. He later said it was important for the Church to move “from a culture of silence” to “a culture of disclosure.”
The give and take between Church and state can also be opaque. Even today, in the most advanced democracies where the crisis has erupted—the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, France—the decision for a diocese to report an abuser to the police is still a matter of interpretation and context, not canon law. Seventeen years after the sexual-abuse crisis erupted in Boston toward the end of the papacy of John Paul II, and after it reemerged in 2010 under Benedict XVI, Church norms on the issue are still difficult to understand, not just for outsiders, but for the clerics who must uphold them. [...]
This week, Monsignor Scicluna said he was pleased that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the body that defends Catholic doctrine, increased the number of canon lawyers from 10 to 17. In the past, Francis has said that the CDF handles about 2,000 cases at a time. The backlog is enormous. The numbers are chilling. The Holy See has said that in the past decade, 3,420 credible cases of abuse worldwide were reported to the CDF, while in the United States, the Catholic Church has said that 6,900 priests have been credibly accused since 1950, according to BishopAccountability.org, an advocacy organization. [...]
It was also significant that the attendees watched painful video testimony from victims from around the world, including Africa and Asia. One woman testified that she had had a sexual relationship with a priest for 13 years, starting at age 15, and that he had forced her to get three abortions because he refused to use birth control. “I feel I have a life destroyed,” she said, according to a transcript provided by the Vatican. “He gave me everything I wanted, when I accepted to have sex; otherwise he would beat me,” she said.
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