Church leaders who fail to take action against paedophile priests are a “further source of evil” for victims of sexual abuse and should be removed from their posts, the Vatican’s child protection commission has said.
In its first report on a scandal that has embroiled the Catholic church for decades, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors said the church was still failing to ensure that clerical sexual abuse cases were dealt with adequately. It also criticised the Vatican office charged with processing complaints of being slow and secretive.
The commission was set up by Pope Francis in 2014 and its first report, published on Tuesday, focused on church protocol in 17 countries. Its publication comes a month after the pontiff was rebuked over the church’s handling of abuse by Belgium’s King Philippe and prime minister Alexander De Croo during a trip to the country.
The report said: “Over its 10 years of service, the commission has seen church leaders being the object of past administrative actions and/or inactions which were a further source of evil for victims/survivors of sexual abuse. Such a reality reveals the need for a disciplinary or administrative procedure providing an efficient path towards the resignation or removal from a post.”
Furthermore, the report said victims of abuse should be given greater access to information about their cases while emphasising the importance of compensating them “as a concrete commitment” to promoting their healing. The compensation, however, should not be just financial, but should also involve actions such as acknowledging mistakes and public apologies.
Cardinal Seán O’Malley, the commission’s chief, said during a press conference that it was thanks to journalists that the church had been forced to confront its history of “terrible abuses”, and that the report marked the first step in its “firm commitment to ensure these events never happen again”.
“Nothing we do will ever be enough to fully repair what has happened,” he said.
Anne Barrett Doyle, a co-founder of BishopAccountability, a watchdog that tracks clergy sexual abuse cases, said that while there were commendable aspects of the report, it “assesses window-dressing” rather than the “reality on the ground”.
“It doesn’t focus on the central and devastating realities: that children in the Catholic church are still being sexually assaulted by clergy, and that universal church law still allows these priests to be reinstated if certain conditions are met. It doesn’t decry the fact that the process for reporting and investigating complicity is flawed, rife with conflict of interest and secrecy.”
Doyle acknowledged that the commission was hampered by its limited purpose. “It is not allowed to examine specific cases,” she said. “The absurdity of this limitation – which surely is no accident – is that the commission cannot possibly do a true audit. The only safeguarding test that matters is whether bishops are removing abusers. This report doesn’t address that, because the commission itself is powerless to do so.”
