(Vatican City) On the initiative of Pope Francis, the Vatican published Thursday guidelines for clergymen on the procedure to follow to investigate suspected sexual assaults on minors in the 'Church.
Gaël BRANCHEREAU
France Media Agency
The Argentine Pope, who made the fight against this scourge in the Catholic Church one of the priorities of his pontificate, had convened in February 2019 an unprecedented summit including 114 presidents of episcopal conferences.
On this occasion he undertook to "give uniform directives for the Church", evoking above all legal references already in force at the civil and canonical level.
In fact, the documents published Thursday do not propose new standards, nor are they intended to substitute the justice of the Catholic Church for the judicial procedure, underlines the Vatican.
Gathered in a "vade-mecum", they constitute an "instrument" intended to help the local authorities of the Church "in the delicate task of handling cases involving deacons, priests and bishops when "They are accused of abusing minors," said Spanish Cardinal Luis Ladaria Ferrer, prefect of the Congregation of the Faith in Rome, in a statement.
"The Vatican text is important, not because it gives new rules [...] but it is a way of systematizing, of laying down the set of rules in which the bishops of the whole world were getting a little lost, "Nicolas Senèze, the Vatican correspondent for the Catholic daily newspaper La Croix
Before "there were rules but they were extremely different texts, which were old, which were renewed, the bishops were lost," added the author of the book on Francis, How America Wants to Change Pope (Bayard, 2019).
The Vatican has notably drawn up a crime reporting form. The alerted official must inform the identity of the suspected priest, his various ministries, the date of the events and the name of the alleged victim (s), the measures taken by the ecclesiastical authority as well as, in the event of criminal proceedings, the name of the prosecutor and lawyers seized.
The Church has been in turmoil for several years with successive revelations on massive scandals of aggressions of a pedophile nature committed for decades by priests or religious and often covered by their hierarchy in several countries, particularly in the United States, Chile or Germany.
Absolute secrecy of the confession
In France, Cardinal Philippe Barbarin was sentenced in 2019 for his silence on the actions of a former priest of his Lyon diocese, Bernard Preynat, himself convicted of sexual assaults on minors.
But M gr Barbarin was then released on appeal last January before resigning from his duties as archbishop in March.
Pope Francis, according to whom these excesses make the clergy "an instrument of Satan", had taken another step last December by lifting the pontifical secret, while maintaining a minimum of confidentiality.
Pontifical secrecy, also sometimes called the pope's secret, is a rule of confidentiality protecting sensitive information relating to the governance of the universal Church, as defined by The Catholic Forum.
Once this secret has been lifted, complaints, testimonies and denunciations must now be brought to justice.
The sovereign pontiff has nevertheless repeatedly affirmed that there is an impossible limit to be exceeded: the secrecy of the confession remains absolute, which therefore excludes a denunciation of facts reported by a faithful in the confessional.
The directives published on Thursday confirm this. "Information from delictum gravius [délit grave] learned in confession is placed under the strictest link of the sacramental seal ".
The confessor is simply encouraged to "try to convince the penitent" to alert people who are able to go to court.