Vatican suggests bishops report abuse to police

[garbon]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110516/ap_on_re_eu/eu_vatican_church_abuse

The Vatican told bishops around the world Monday that it was important to cooperate with police in reporting priests who rape and molest children and said that the prelates should develop guidelines for preventing sex abuse by next May.

But the suggestions in the letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are vague and nonbinding and contain no enforcement mechanisms to ensure bishops actually draft the guidelines or follow them.

That is a significant omission given the latest scandal in the United States involves allegations Philadelphia's archbishop left accused priests in ministry despite purportedly tough U.S. guidelines, and evidence that Irish bishops were stonewalling an independent board overseeing compliance with the guidelines of the church in Ireland.

The document marks the latest effort by the Vatican to show it's serious about rooting out priestly pedophiles and preventing abuse following the eruption on a global scale of the abuse scandal last year with thousands of victims coming forward.

But it failed to impress advocates for victims who have long blamed the power of bishops bent on protecting the church and its priests for fueling the scandal. Without fear of punishment themselves, bishops frequently moved pedophile priests from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police or punishing them under church law.

"There's nothing that will make a child safer today or tomorrow or next month or next year," said Barbara Dorris, outreach director for the main U.S. victims group Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests.

Critically, the letter reinforces bishops' exclusive authority in dealing with abuse cases. It says independent lay review boards that have been created in some countries to oversee the church's child protection policies and ensure compliance "cannot substitute" for bishops' judgment and power.

Recently, such lay review committees in the U.S. and Ireland have reported that some bishops "failed miserably" in following their own guidelines and had thwarted the boards' work by withholding information and by enacting legal hurdles that made ensuring compliance impossible.

"Our central concern is that bishops and religious leaders retain enormous discretionary powers to decide if an allegation is credible," said Maeve Lewis, executive director of the Irish victims group One in Four.

"Clergymen do not have the skills or expertise to make sound decisions in this regard: that is a matter for law enforcement and child protection specialists," Lewis said, calling the Vatican letter "dangerously flawed."

The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the document's emphasis on the central authority of bishops was not a negative commentary on the role of lay review boards but rather a reminder of the "great responsibility" bishops have in dealing with abuse cases as heads of their dioceses.

In the letter, the Vatican told the bishops "it is important to cooperate" with civil law enforcement authorities and follow civil reporting requirements, though it doesn't make such reporting mandatory. The Vatican has said such a binding rule would be problematic for priests working in countries with repressive regimes.

The letter told the bishops' conferences to draft guidelines for preventing abuse and caring for victims and report them back to the Congregation by May 2012, and to consult with superiors of religious orders to do so. It said bishops should be prepared to listen to victims, to create "safe environment" programs for minors and to better screen seminarians and ensure they receive proper training about celibacy and the damage done to victims of sex abuse.

It did not mention possible financial compensation for victims.

Lombardi stressed that such measures are to be taken up in individual bishops conferences, noting that in many case payments are decided by civil courts anyway.

He emphasized that the letter issued Monday was never designed to offer specific, binding recommendations to bishops since their situations are all different. Rather, the aim was to offer a "common, substantial denominator of fundamental principles and observations that everyone can take into account in making policies that are adapted for their situations."

Many bishops conferences have already drafted guidelines, but one glaring example of a country that hasn't is Italy, home of the Vatican, where just Sunday the country's top cardinal informed the faithful of his diocese that their longtime pastor had been jailed for allegedly abusing a 16-year-old boy and giving him drugs.

Lombardi said he expected the Italian bishops conference to now come up with conference-wide guidelines.

The letter stresses that accused priests are presumed innocent until proven guilty.

That too is the case of the U.S. norms, which were enacted after the abuse scandal exploded in Boston in 2002. But the United States norms nevertheless bar credibly accused priests from any public church work if sufficient evidence is found that they abused a minor. Clergy found guilty are permanently barred from public ministry and, in some cases, ousted from the priesthood.

The guidance given to bishops in the letter Monday makes no mention of removing priests but reminds bishops that they are "always able to limit the exercise of the cleric's ministry until the accusations are clarified."

The U.S. norms were approved by the Vatican and are church law in the U.S. The Vatican said Monday that the other bishops' conferences could seek Vatican approval as well, though Lombardi suggested that some bishops conferences may find they can be more flexible and responsive to changing needs if the norms don't go through the tedious process of being approved by the Vatican as church law.

The letter is being issued at a time when the U.S. norms have been put into question after a Philadelphia grand jury earlier this year indicted a high-ranking church official on child endangerment charges for allegedly transferring predator priests. Four co-defendants — two priests, an ex-priest and a former Catholic school teacher — are charged with raping children.

The grand jury found "substantial evidence of abuse" committed by at least 37 other priests who remained in active ministry at the time of the report. Philadelphia's archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, initially insisted that no archdiocesan priests in ministry had an "admitted or established allegation" against them. But he later suspended two dozen of the 37 priests.

The scandal exposed some of the loopholes in the Vatican-approved U.S. norms that leave it entirely up to bishops to determine the credibility of allegations; the new Vatican instruction confirms that by both reinforcing bishops' responsibility and authority and seemingly diminishing the importance of lay review boards in checking their compliance.

Last week, the head of the Philadelphia archdiocese's lay review board publicly accused Rigali and his bishops of having "failed miserably at being open and transparent" because they prescreened which cases the board reviewed and left out crucial information for some priests they did review.

And last week, Ireland's National Board for Safeguarding Children, a church-appointed independent panel overseeing compliance with Ireland's guidelines, said it had been prevented from fulfilling its mandate to review diocesan responses to abuse cases by bishops' legal concerns about the priests' privacy.

On Friday, Amnesty International listed the Vatican in its annual report of global human rights abuses, citing revelations of clerical abuse around the world and the "enduring failure" of the church to address the crimes properly.

[The Brain]

The Vaticant strikes again.

[Barrister]

You know I feel comfortable saying that the Vatican should report any sexual abuse by its priests even in "repressive regimes".

[Valmy]

If it was Vince Lombardi instead of Federico Lombardi things would be different 

[Viking]

About fucking time. The Vatican tells priests to stop subverting local law enforcement.

[garbon]

About fucking time. The Vatican tells priests to stop subverting local law enforcement.

Actually the Vatican made a non-binding suggestion that guidelines be created by next May.

[Viking]

About fucking time. The Vatican tells priests to stop subverting local law enforcement.

Actually the Vatican made a non-binding suggestion that guidelines be created by next May.

Fucking God Botherers

[alfred russel]

This is a step toward the vatican admitting that Thomas Becket had it coming.

[Scipio]

Why doesn't the Vatican have a global sexual abuse policy?  Jesus.  This is not a diocesan matter!

FUcking amateur canon lawyers.

[grumbler]

Why doesn't the Vatican have a global sexual abuse policy?  Jesus.  This is not a diocesan matter!

Obviously, it is because "catholic" does not mean "universal." 

[Martinus]

Vatican has global policies on important issues (such as not letting women be priests). When it comes to secondary issues (like children fucking), it recognizes local cultural differences.

[garbon]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110518/ap_on_re/us_rel_church_abuse_report

Study: Homosexuality, celibacy didn't cause abuse

Researchers commissioned by the nation's Roman Catholic bishops to analyze the pattern of clergy sex abuse have concluded that homosexuality, celibacy and an all-male priesthood did not cause the scandal.

The study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York instead said that the problem was largely the result of poor seminary training and insufficient emotional support for men ordained in the 1940s and 1950s, who were not able to withstand the social upheaval they confronted as pastors in the 1960s. Crime and other deviant behavior increased overall in the United States during this period, when the rate of abuse by priests was climbing.

"The rise in abuse cases in the 1960s and 1970s was influenced by social factors in society generally," the report's authors said. "Factors that were invariant during the time period addressed, such as celibacy, were not responsible for the increase or decline in abuse cases over this time."

Victims' groups dismissed the report as an attempt to focus blame for the scandal on priests, instead of on bishops who allowed offenders to stay in ministry without warning parents or police. "They want us to fixate on abusive priests, not callous bishops," the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

The report, set to be released Wednesday, is the third study commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2002, when the abuse crisis erupted in the Archdiocese of Boston and caused what church leaders have called the deepest crisis in American Catholicism. A person close to the bishops provided an early copy to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity since the person was not authorized to release the information.

The scandal has cost U.S. dioceses nearly $3 billion and has spread to Europe and beyond. Just this week, Vatican officials instructed bishops worldwide to develop discipline policies for abusive priests within a year.

The debate over why priest-abusers were kept in ministry in the U.S. often fell along ideological lines. Liberals blamed mandatory celibacy or the lack of women in the church hierarchy, while conservatives blamed gay priests, since the overwhelming majority of known victims were boys.

The John Jay researchers, however, said that the offenders chose to victimize boys mainly because clergy had greater access to them. The study notes that gay men began enrolling in seminaries in larger numbers in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at a time when the rate of abuse was declining.

The authors, in findings first reported by Religion News Service, said they found "no single cause" of child sex abuse by priests and no "psychological characteristics" or "developmental histories" that distinguished guilty priests from clergy who did not molest children.

Although the victims studied by the researchers were all minors, the authors said only a tiny percentage of accused priests — less than 5 percent — could be technically defined as pedophiles. The John Jay researchers define pedophile as an adult with an intense sexual attraction to prepubescent children. However, victim advocates have disputed that classification by age, since boys ages 11 to 14 were the largest group of known victims, which could include children who had not yet gone through adolescence. The American Psychiatric Association defines pedophilia as attraction to children, usually age 13 or younger.

According to previous studies conducted by John Jay and other surveys commissioned by the bishops, U.S. dioceses have received abuse claims from more than 15,700 people against about 6,000 clerics since 1950. Abuse cases peaked in the 1970s, then began declining sharply in 1985, as the bishops and society general gained awareness about molestation and its impact on children, the study said.

Dioceses reported that nearly all of the allegations they received were reported after 2002 in response to intense news coverage of the problem and after child victims gained courage as adults to come forward. John Jay researchers said this means that the bishops were not aware of the true scope of the problem until then, an assertion victims' groups say is naive.

Critics argue the study cannot be trusted since the raw data was provided by the bishops.

In February, a Philadelphia grand jury alleged that the local archdiocese kept 37 credibly accused clergy in public ministry, despite repeated pledges by the nation's bishops that no offenders would stay on duty. In response, Philadelphia Cardinal Justin Rigali suspended about two dozen clergy and hired a former prosecutor to review the cases. Ana Maria Catanzaro, the head of the Philadelphia review board, which was formed to advise bishops on abuse cases, said last week that the archdiocese had "failed miserably at being open and transparent" and had kept some cases from the board.

"What Philadelphia does is reveal the flaws in the process," said Ann Barrett Doyle of the advocacy group BishopAccountability.org, which is compiling a public database of all records related to the scandal.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the bishops' conference, said church leaders fully cooperated with the $1.8 million study, which was funded by the bishops, Catholic foundations, individual donors and a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice. Dioceses have spent tens of millions of dollars since 2002 on child safety programs that include background checks for people who work with children and training for adults and children to identify abuse.

"John Jay was chosen to do the study because of its independence from the church," Walsh said. "John Jay was free to consult whomever they wanted and they did so."