VATICAN CITY—The Vatican issued a revised set of in-house rules Thursday to respond to clerical sex abuse, targeting priests who molest the mentally disabled as well as children and priests who use child pornography, but making few substantive changes to existing practice.
The rules cover the canonical penalties and procedures used for the most grave crimes in the church, both sacramental and moral, and double the statute of limitations applied to them.
One new element included lists the attempted ordination of women as a “grave crime” subject to the same set of procedures and punishments meted out for sex abuse — despite arguments that grouping the two in the same document would imply equating them.
That drew immediate criticism from women’s ordination groups, who said making a moral equivalent between women priests and child rapists was offensive.
“The idea that women seeking to spread the message of God somehow defiles the Eucharist reveals an antiquated, backwards church that still views women as unclean and unholy,” said Erin Saiz Hanna, executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, a U.S.-based organization that works to ordain women as priests, deacons and bishops.
Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI have said the question of ordaining women priests — often raised as an antidote to the priest shortage and to bring about more gender equality in the church — is not up for discussion.
The Vatican in 2007 issued a decree saying the attempted ordination of women would result in automatic excommunication for the woman and the priest who tries to ordain her. That is repeated in the new document, adding that the priest can also be punished by being defrocked.
At a briefing Thursday, the Vatican’s sex crimes prosecutor, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, defended the inclusion of both sex abuse and ordination of women in the same document as a way of codifying two of the most serious canonical crimes against sacraments and morals that the congregation deals with.
“They are grave, but on different levels,” he said, and noted that the document also lists crimes against the sacraments including apostasy, heresy and schism for the first time.
The new rules also make no mention of the need for bishops to report clerical sex abuse to police, provide no canonical sanctions for bishops who cover up for abusers and do not include any “one-strike and you’re out” policy for pedophile priests as demanded by some victims.
As a result, they failed to satisfy victims’ advocates, who said the revised rules amounted to little more than “administrative housekeeping” of existing practice when what was needed were bold new rules threatening bishops who fail to report molester priests.
Scicluna acknowledged it was “only a document,” and didn’t solve the problem of clerical abuse. He defended the lack of any mention of the need to report abuse to police, saying all Christians were required to obey civil laws that would already demand sex crimes be reported.
“If civil law requires you report, you must obey civil law,” Scicluna said. But “it’s not for canonical legislation to get itself involved with civil law.”
Victims’ groups have accused the church’s internal justice system of failing to deal with abuse allegations and allowing bishops to ignore complaints in order to protect the church.
“The first thing the church should be doing is reporting crimes to civil authorities,” said Andrew Madden, a former Dublin altar boy who took the first public lawsuit against the church in Ireland in 1995.
“That’s far, far more important than deciding whether a criminal priest should be defrocked or not,” he told the AP in Dublin. “The church’s internal rules are no more important than the rules of your local golf club.”
Barbara Dorris, of Survivors’ Network for Those Abused by Priests, said the new guidelines “can be summed up in three words: missing the boat.”
“They deal with one small procedure at the very tail end of the problem: defrocking pedophile priests,” she said. “Hundreds of thousands of kids, however, have been sexually violated (by) many other more damaging and reckless moves by bishops and other church staff.”
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