The Independent News Source
NCR on Kindle - NCR classifieds - YouTube - Twitter - Facebook - Email Alerts - RSS
Printer-friendly version
PDF versionVatican abuse summit: Prosecutor decries ‘deadly culture of silence’
by John L Allen Jr on Feb. 08, 2012
ROME -- The Vatican’s top prosecutor on sex abuse cases today bluntly decried “a deadly culture of silence” on clerical abuse, calling such denial “in itself wrong and unjust.”
Maltese Monsignor Charles Scicluna told participants in a Vatican summit on sex abuse that while the church now has clear laws to punish abusers, just having such laws on the books isn’t enough.
“Our people need to know that the law is being applied,” he said. “No strategy for the prevention of child abuse will ever work without commitment and accountability.”
Scicluna likewise reaffirmed the obligation of church leaders to cooperate with civil authorities, including reporting abuse allegations to police and prosecutors.
“Sexual abuse of minors is not just a canonical [violation] or a breach of a code of conduct internal to an institution, whether it be religious or other,” he said. “It is also a crime prosecuted by civil law.”
As a result, Scicluna said, Catholic officials have “the duty to cooperate with state authorities in our response to child abuse.”
Scicluna spoke as part of a four-day symposium on the sexual abuse crisis titled “Towards Healing and Renewal”, which is being held at Rome’s Jesuit-run Gregorian University. It brings together roughly 100 bishops and religious superiors from around the world, in tandem with child protection experts.
Scicluna serves as the Promoter of Justice in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a position he first took up under then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, today Pope Benedict XVI. In effect, that makes Scicluna the Vatican’s “D.A.” on sex abuse cases; among other things, he was responsible for the investigation of the late Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legionaries of Christ, which led to a 2006 edict restricting Maciel to a life of “prayer and penance.”
Scicluna’s address this morning pivoted on the moral and legal dimensions of the fight against child abuse.
“A deadly culture of silence or “omertà” is in itself wrong and unjust,” he said.
“Other enemies of the truth are the deliberate denial of known facts, and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of legitimate disclosure of crime.”
Scicluna laid out five principles for thinking about the church’s responsibility to break that culture of silence:
Subscribe to NCR
Want to read more about important issues in the life of the Church? A subscription to NCR will keep you up to date and informed.
- Truth implies a commitment to justice.
- Justice, based on truth, “evokes a response from the individual’s conscience.”
- Respect for truth breeds confidence in the rule of law; ignoring the truth “generates distrust and suspicion.”
- Rights must be protected, but in the context of concern for the common good.
- Respect for the law avoids “pastoral” distortions of the law – meaning, in part, reluctance to punish abusers.
Scicluna insisted that the church’s understanding of the common good must include the child welfare.
“Safety of children is a paramount concern for the church, and an integral part of its concept of the ‘common good’,” he said.
Discussing the individual response to abuse, Scicluna stressed “the radical need of the victim to be heard attentively, to be understood and believed, to be treated with dignity as he or she plods on the tiresome journey of recovery and healing.”
At the same time, he warned against what he called “the limited phenomenon of some victims who refuse to move on in life, who seem to have indentified ‘self’ simply with ‘having been victims’.”
“These fellow brothers and sisters of ours merit our special attention and care,” he said.
In remarks to the press, Scicluna clarified that point.
“It’s unfair to expect that abuse by a priest should define the person” who suffered it, Scicluna said.”That would be a permanent form of abuse. [It would mean that] the harmful effect of what a minister of the church has done to them will remain with them forever.”
The experience of abuse, Scicluna said, “does not define you. You are bigger, your dignity is greater, than the harm that has been done to you.”
Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, an American expert on clerical sexual abuse, said that it’s important for the church “to hear the anger” of victims, but also to help them in “not being stuck” in that anger.
"Discussing the individual
"Discussing the individual response to abuse, Scicluna stressed “the radical need of the victim to be heard attentively, to be understood and believed, to be treated with dignity as he or she plods on the tiresome journey of recovery and healing.”
Memo the Vatican and SNAP:
WORDS MATTER. LANGUAGE MATTERS.
Just in case you don't think so, watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=Hzgzim5m7oU&vq=medium
The words of Scicluna and
The words of Scicluna and Rosetti on how victims must move on speaks volumes about their own distorted group psychology and poor professional training. I am not a victim of child sexual abuse but I have known some, and I know that the very anger that motivates them to speak out against the likes of Rosetti and other complicit clerics in this massive cover-up is an anger born of healing. Victims that have not "moved on," can't free themselves of the woundedness, fear and Stockholm Syndrome that keeps so many from standing up for the truth and for the justice which has yet to be given: that of the just firing of every one of the participants at this summit who allowed children to be raped over and over again. If their words don't convince the world of how narcisistic and objectifying are the personalities governing our Church, nothing will.
People who have been abused
People who have been abused by clergy do not REFUSE to move on.....they are UNABLE to move on....because of the response from other clergy, the heirarchy and even some of the laity. As many people keep pointing out, but this is the bit they just don't get, yes people can get over abuse IF IT IS DEALT WITH PROPERLY. What keeps the victims stuck and unable to move on is the lack of justice, the helplessness to try to protect others, and the loss of trust in those we trusted most. I naively thought that I was helping my beloved Church by telling. Being stone-walled by arrogant and self serving clerics was far worse than the original abuse....I can cope with the idea that you can get an abuser anywhere, I can get over that but I can't cope with the idea that those who are supposed to represent Christ on earth are most un-Christlike in their motives and priorities. I didn't want anything, I understood he was sick, I wanted him treated kindly but removed from a situation where he could harm others. He's still on the loose and I'm still on medication.
Note to any priest/ bishop/ vatican official who may be reading this page: In spite of the shock and horror at what happenned, I survived. What destroyed me was the response when I tried to tell. I can cope with one sick man....I can't cope with my beautiful Church falling to pieces and not being what I thought it was.
Sorry people, I don't usually get in such a rant, but this really touched a nerve. I've got myself into a state now. I need to go. Aaaaaaagh.
This news out of the Vatican
This news out of the Vatican is a real joke! Just when the Vatican is putting on an international "Dog and Pony Show," concerning how well She has learned how to deal with Survivors, the Archbishop of Milwaukee pulls a cute, little stunt. He asked ALL victims of Priest Pedophilia in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee to come forward, because the Church was applying for bankruptcy. Over 500 came forward. Now, he and his attorneys are trying to get 95% of the cases thrown out of court! The Vatican's international symposium "Towards Healing and Renewal" is all over the news, at least in every Western Country. How gullible does the Church think the public really is (q mark broken). Then, less than a week ago, Cardinal Egan claimed that "They did nothing wrong," when Survivors of Priest Pedophilia came forward! If the Vatican doesn't come down really hard on the Archbishop of Milwaukee and Cardinal Egan, She'll have "egg on her face," forever, and I'm including the afterlife, where the Church can have an interplanetary symposium in Hell, for all it will be worth!
NICE WORDS, BUT ...........
NICE WORDS, BUT ........... John, the papal prosecutor Scicluna talks a good game; but that's it. He lacks independence. He has accepted inadequate staffing and curial oversight, which has led to many of pedophile priests getting off, if they haven't died of old age before he got to really accessing their files.
Once again, this conference is only proving irrefutably that the pope and curia will never reform themselves.
Given the passivity of pew Catholics and the timidity and/cupidity of most in the Catholic elite, we will just have to let the civil prosecutors and bankruptcy judges clean up the hierarchy for us.
The prosecutors and judges can and will do this--there is no doubt about that. They are already well underway, which likely served as a stimulus for this PR conference.
Anyone know if Poland is
Anyone know if Poland is represented at the conference? (See Jonatham Luxmoore's separate article today in NCR.)
It is obvious that Scicluna
It is obvious that Scicluna doesn't understand the trauma and long term consequences that sexual abuse causes young children, especially when their families and the clerics don't believe them, and worse when they are shamed and blamed for the abuse. Now he tells them to "move on" with their lives. I would like to tell Scicluna to move on himself. He is doing more harm than being the source of healing. What a travesty.
Once AGAIN the church's
Once AGAIN the church's supposed experts on this issue say the same thing...ad finitum. To protect the hierarchy they keep putting the blame on we abuse survivors. WE have to change! WE have to move on! There is nothing in these clerics' words that questions the underlying truth of the church's response to this tragedy, and that is that the very hierarchy itself and how it is composed is the real culprit. No finessing this reality will work. This church is not holy. It is not truthful. It is not ordained of the divine. Its leadership is corrupt and immoral to the core, and as it is currently composed, will never be able to be transparent. If you want to truly get to the truth, depose the pope and the Curia. Then start on firing the vast majority of bishops.
It is surely not competent
It is surely not competent and genuine therapeutic practice to leave a person in a transitional phase - which is what, at its very best, 'anger' has to be.
It is, I gather, the primary objective and stock-in-trade of some forms of what would have to be characterized as insidiously and treacherously fake 'therapy'.
While there are surely certain possible - or even probable - issues that a competent therapist might be alert to when a patient presents with an abuse matter, nothing is instantly and immediately guaranteed, especially in the long term, because the resilience and other characteristics unique to the individual patient are always unknowns which develop dynamically as the treatment progresses. One can never make predictions at the outset in therapy.
Nor can one legitimately engage in competent therapy if committed beforehand to a matrix of predictive and rigid assumptions and presumptions that actually serve to constrict the dynamic possibilities of the patient's course of treatment and his/her progress.
It is hardly impossible that Scicluna knows this and that his comment was based upon all that Therapy 101 knowledge.
There is far more to the
There is far more to the story of accused Catholic priests than what has to date been presented in Rome. Msgr. Stephen Rosetti recently presented to the Holy See that 95% of the claims against priests have been credible. Yet he offered no authority to support such a statement. The media watchdog site, www.TheMediaReport.com, has quoted former Los Angeles District Attorney Donald Steier – clearly someone who has been in the trenches with these claims – who today says that 50% of them have been false and financially driven, at least in the United States. Other writers have shown that the peculiar American practice of contingency law and mediated settlements has set the stage for a proliferation of false claims. Another website, www.TheseStoneWalls.com, has chartered a thoughtfully navigated course through the high seas of fraud and false witness plaguing this story from day one. A simple Google search for “Catholic Priests Falsely Accused” will tell another side of the story that in all fairness the Holy See must hear.
Post new comment