On Tuesday, October 29, the Vatican published a long-awaited first report on the protection of minors in the Church. The authors recommend accelerating the marginalization of perpetrators, improving victims’ access to “the truth” and better train the people responsible for supporting them.
Presented as a “first step”This first annual report of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, an advisory body created in 2014 by Pope Francis, does not identify cases of sexual assault in the Church. But it evaluates the procedures established to facilitate reporting, collect the words of victims and support them, and punish perpetrators.
In April 2022, the leader of Catholics (1.4 billion people) asked the commission for this report to have information “reliable about what is happening and what needs to change”. The members of the commission, appointed directly by the Pope, are religious and lay experts in various fields related to the protection of people, including law, education, psychology, psychiatry or human rights.
“Truth, justice, reparations and institutional reforms must serve as a point of reference and foundation for our work”estimated in this report the president of the commission, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, who nevertheless recognizes that“bring recognition and reparation to the crisis of violence [sexuelles] in the Church it is difficult ».
Accelerate “resignation procedures”
After having consulted responsible and faithful people on several continents, the commission observes that the priority refers to the request of the victims to have “access to the truth”. The Church must “study measures that guarantee everyone the right to information”especially “about the circumstances and responsibilities”. The victim must, for example, know what has become of his attacker if he is not likely to be found in his local parish, at mass or in catechism. To this end, the commission suggests considering the creation of a mediating function. It also promotes a “more uniform definition of vulnerability” learning lessons from victims’ testimonies.
During her hearings, a victim declared herself astonished because “The least difficult part of this whole process was the aggression” : “The truly terrible thing is that when you dare to speak, at that moment the world begins to collapse on you. »
Without going into details, the commission considers it necessary to accelerate “resignation procedures” Church leaders implicated in child abuse cases. It does not specify whether this process should take place in case of suspicion and complaint or at the end of a judicial process – canonical or civil –, it simply adds: “When justified. »
All these efforts, he emphasizes, come up against great disparities in cultural perceptions in societies, within the institution itself, administrative obstacles or deficiencies, lack of training… In some parts of the world, the issue of sexual assaults within of the Church has become increasingly serious. arose “more than a generation ago”while in others “only about ten years ago”. In still others, “the issue has not yet entered public debate”.
Significant media inequalities in the world
The commission points out, for example, for Africa that “Protection culture is a new concept, which requires awareness, information, training and skills development”. While in Mexico “important cultural barriers” face the imperative of reporting sexual violence and, therefore, “They constitute a clear obstruction to the justice process”. In Europe itself, the report regrets, “In several places the absence of reliable statistics on violence persists” Sexual relations in the local Church.
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Also observing the strong inequalities in resources from one continent to another, he underlines “The urgency of increasing solidarity” internally in order to allocate adequate resources to countries that lack them in Central and South America, Africa and Asia, to allow the creation of reception and listening centers for victims and to finance training in the prevention of sexual violence.
Since his election in 2013, Francis has intensified measures against the scourge of sexual violence: lifting of the pontifical secret, obligation to report any suspicion and any attempted cover-up by the hierarchy, reordering of criminal sanctions, etc.
But victims’ associations consider that concrete actions remain insufficient and regret that the clergy are not obliged to report possible crimes to civil justice, unless the country’s laws force them to do so. The secrecy of confession also remains absolute.
