The papal decree behind the Vatican's abuse cover-up
Issued by Pius XI, secret decree has been in force since 1922
Pope Pius XI. Picture:
It comes as little or no surprise that the Vatican has been accused
of covering up cases of priests committing child sex abuse. What may be
more surprising is the fact that, since 1922, secrecy and cover-up have
been official Vatican policy, instigated by nothing less than papal
decree.
There was hardly a news source in the world this week that did not give headline coverage to the UN’s scathing condemnation of the Vatican’s testimony on child abuse to its Committee on the Rights of the Child. The condemnation came in the UN’s official response, released on February 5, to the Holy See’s submission. The language was unstintingly blunt.
"The Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices that have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators," was one of its most damning sentences.
The UN is, of course, an organization that normally deals in diplomatic niceties. But here it effectively endorsed vociferous victim groups such as SNAP (Survivors Network Of Those Abused By Priests), as well as the massed ranks of Church-baiters, and accused the Vatican of a cover-up.
The fact is, though, that this cover-up has not been caused by underhand dealings or the incompetence of bishops – although it cannot be denied that, in some cases, they too have played a part - but is the direct result of a papal decree issued by Pius XI in 1922.
Pius XI and five successors have created, maintained and expanded a system of “privilege of clergy,” which dates back to the 4th century. This system protects abusing priests from being tried in civil courts for their crimes, and ensures instead that they face trial only in the Church’s own canonical courts.
Relatively speaking, it is something of an innovation. For not far short of a millennium, canon law used to decree that after degradatio - the Church equivalent of a dishonourable discharge - priests found guilty of child sex abuse were to be handed over to the civil authorities for further punishment.
Decrees to this effect were issued by Pope Innocent III (1198), Pope St Pius V (1566 and 1568), the Fourth and Fifth Lateran Councils (1215 and 1514) and the Council of Trent (1551).
But this changed drastically in 1917 with the first Code of Canon Law, a sweeping reform that discarded canons that were regarded as no longer relevant, and kept or modified those that were. The canon that ordered priest child sex abusers to be handed over to the civil courts was among the ones rejected.
That paved the way for Crimen Sollicitationis, the fateful decree of Pope Pius XI in 1922, which overturned the earlier policy of cooperation and imposed the strictest secrecy on any allegations of child sex abuse against clergy.
Crimen Sollicitationis has never been officially published. Indeed, the document itself stipulated that it must be kept in a locked safe, with the bishop and his chancellor having the only keys.
As an ultimate irony, it also stipulated that reporting to the police with any information obtained through a Church investigation would lead to automatic excommunication that could only be lifted by the pope.
Statements made between 1997 and 2002, from top ranking Vatican officials, cardinals and bishops, have all confirmed instances where canon law has prevented bishops from reporting pedophile priests to the police. Two cardinals, Castrillón and Rodríguez, went so far as to state that a bishop should go to jail rather than report a pedophile priest.
In the 1990s, a number of bishops in the United States, Ireland, Britain and Australia wanted this canon law repealed. The most that the Holy See has conceded, via amendments in 2002 and again in 2010, is to allow reporting where local civil law requires it. But in many countries, no civil laws require the vast majority of sex abuse allegations to be reported. These include the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and New Zealand, most parts of the United States and Canada and every state in Australia, other than New South Wales.
When Bishop Scicluna, the Holy See’s representative, appeared in January before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, he was asked why the Church did not require the disclosure of all allegations. Scicluna said that “education is the key to empowerment. Every local church has a moral duty to instruct people about their rights.” In other words, it is up to the victim to report the abuse, not the Church.
In Ireland in 2010, after the Murphy Commission found there had been a widespread cover-up of child sex abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, Pope Benedict wrote a “Pastoral Letter to the People of Ireland.” The Murphy Commission had said harsh things about canon law and the requirements of secrecy, and found that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated” the cover up.
Pope Benedict ignored this criticism, and attacked the bishops for failing to use “the long established norms of canon law” to deal with these priests. But his letter wrote the script for a second cover-up: blame the bishops, apologize to the victims and hide the involvement of six popes, who, since 1922, had ordered, maintained and confirmed the status quo: Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI himself.
This papal involvement started to come under scrutiny in around 2006 with a flurry of newspaper articles and television programs, like the BBC Panorama investigation entitled Sex Crimes and the Vatican.
A number of of them focused on the canonical concept of ‘pontifical secrecy,’ which states that some matters require exceptional secrecy and maintaining that secrecy should be considered a grave obligation. Paul VI added pontifical secrecy to the original Crimen Sollicitationis and John Paul II re-emphasized it.
The media rumblings prompted a Vatican spokesman to state that pontifical secrecy did not prevent reporting to the police and only applied to the Church’s “internal procedures”.
It was a denial that proved generally unconvincing; the role of canon law and the Holy See in the cover-up of child sex abuse has continued to come under increasing scrutiny. Indeed, it has become a crucial part of two Australian inquiries which both started in 2013.
The Church’s 150+ page submissions to the parliamentary inquiry in Victoria and to Australia’s Federal Royal Commission have presented chronologies of important reports, and civil and canonical legislation from 1961 onwards, dealing with child sex abuse. But there is no mention of the 1962 reissue of Crimen Sollicitationis. The 1983 Code of Canon Law and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela of 2001 and its revision of 2010 are discussed, but with no mention of their requirement of pontifical secrecy.
At the Victorian Parliamentary hearings, Australian bishops accused their predecessors of “effectively facilitating” child sexual abuse, of being “naïve” and making “terrible mistakes.” But everything their predecessors did, misguided as it was, followed canon law.
In October the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which speaks on behalf of the Church at the Federal Royal Commission, told the Australian community that it had been “kept in the dark for too long” about child sex abuse in the Church. The Council’s CEO went on to claim that the Council’s submission was “the most comprehensive document ever produced by the Church dealing with child sexual abuse. It is a warts-and-all history, going back many decades.”
Yet this history makes no mention of the biggest wart of all, canon law and pontifical secrecy; these are still strictly under wraps. People are being kept in the dark about canon law, the cornerstone of the cover-up, not just in Australia but everywhere.
Meanwhile, pontifical secrecy still prevails. The de facto privilege of clergy will continue wherever the Church leaders can get away with it.
Kieran Tapsell is a retired lawyer with degrees in Theology and Law. His book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Secret of the Holy Office and Child Sexual Abuse is to be published in May 2014.
There was hardly a news source in the world this week that did not give headline coverage to the UN’s scathing condemnation of the Vatican’s testimony on child abuse to its Committee on the Rights of the Child. The condemnation came in the UN’s official response, released on February 5, to the Holy See’s submission. The language was unstintingly blunt.
"The Holy See has not acknowledged the extent of the crimes committed, has not taken the necessary measures to address cases of child sexual abuse and to protect children, and has adopted policies and practices that have led to the continuation of the abuse by and the impunity of the perpetrators," was one of its most damning sentences.
The UN is, of course, an organization that normally deals in diplomatic niceties. But here it effectively endorsed vociferous victim groups such as SNAP (Survivors Network Of Those Abused By Priests), as well as the massed ranks of Church-baiters, and accused the Vatican of a cover-up.
The fact is, though, that this cover-up has not been caused by underhand dealings or the incompetence of bishops – although it cannot be denied that, in some cases, they too have played a part - but is the direct result of a papal decree issued by Pius XI in 1922.
Pius XI and five successors have created, maintained and expanded a system of “privilege of clergy,” which dates back to the 4th century. This system protects abusing priests from being tried in civil courts for their crimes, and ensures instead that they face trial only in the Church’s own canonical courts.
Relatively speaking, it is something of an innovation. For not far short of a millennium, canon law used to decree that after degradatio - the Church equivalent of a dishonourable discharge - priests found guilty of child sex abuse were to be handed over to the civil authorities for further punishment.
Decrees to this effect were issued by Pope Innocent III (1198), Pope St Pius V (1566 and 1568), the Fourth and Fifth Lateran Councils (1215 and 1514) and the Council of Trent (1551).
But this changed drastically in 1917 with the first Code of Canon Law, a sweeping reform that discarded canons that were regarded as no longer relevant, and kept or modified those that were. The canon that ordered priest child sex abusers to be handed over to the civil courts was among the ones rejected.
That paved the way for Crimen Sollicitationis, the fateful decree of Pope Pius XI in 1922, which overturned the earlier policy of cooperation and imposed the strictest secrecy on any allegations of child sex abuse against clergy.
Crimen Sollicitationis has never been officially published. Indeed, the document itself stipulated that it must be kept in a locked safe, with the bishop and his chancellor having the only keys.
As an ultimate irony, it also stipulated that reporting to the police with any information obtained through a Church investigation would lead to automatic excommunication that could only be lifted by the pope.
Statements made between 1997 and 2002, from top ranking Vatican officials, cardinals and bishops, have all confirmed instances where canon law has prevented bishops from reporting pedophile priests to the police. Two cardinals, Castrillón and Rodríguez, went so far as to state that a bishop should go to jail rather than report a pedophile priest.
In the 1990s, a number of bishops in the United States, Ireland, Britain and Australia wanted this canon law repealed. The most that the Holy See has conceded, via amendments in 2002 and again in 2010, is to allow reporting where local civil law requires it. But in many countries, no civil laws require the vast majority of sex abuse allegations to be reported. These include the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria and New Zealand, most parts of the United States and Canada and every state in Australia, other than New South Wales.
When Bishop Scicluna, the Holy See’s representative, appeared in January before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child, he was asked why the Church did not require the disclosure of all allegations. Scicluna said that “education is the key to empowerment. Every local church has a moral duty to instruct people about their rights.” In other words, it is up to the victim to report the abuse, not the Church.
In Ireland in 2010, after the Murphy Commission found there had been a widespread cover-up of child sex abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, Pope Benedict wrote a “Pastoral Letter to the People of Ireland.” The Murphy Commission had said harsh things about canon law and the requirements of secrecy, and found that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated” the cover up.
Pope Benedict ignored this criticism, and attacked the bishops for failing to use “the long established norms of canon law” to deal with these priests. But his letter wrote the script for a second cover-up: blame the bishops, apologize to the victims and hide the involvement of six popes, who, since 1922, had ordered, maintained and confirmed the status quo: Pius XI, Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II and Benedict XVI himself.
This papal involvement started to come under scrutiny in around 2006 with a flurry of newspaper articles and television programs, like the BBC Panorama investigation entitled Sex Crimes and the Vatican.
A number of of them focused on the canonical concept of ‘pontifical secrecy,’ which states that some matters require exceptional secrecy and maintaining that secrecy should be considered a grave obligation. Paul VI added pontifical secrecy to the original Crimen Sollicitationis and John Paul II re-emphasized it.
The media rumblings prompted a Vatican spokesman to state that pontifical secrecy did not prevent reporting to the police and only applied to the Church’s “internal procedures”.
It was a denial that proved generally unconvincing; the role of canon law and the Holy See in the cover-up of child sex abuse has continued to come under increasing scrutiny. Indeed, it has become a crucial part of two Australian inquiries which both started in 2013.
The Church’s 150+ page submissions to the parliamentary inquiry in Victoria and to Australia’s Federal Royal Commission have presented chronologies of important reports, and civil and canonical legislation from 1961 onwards, dealing with child sex abuse. But there is no mention of the 1962 reissue of Crimen Sollicitationis. The 1983 Code of Canon Law and Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela of 2001 and its revision of 2010 are discussed, but with no mention of their requirement of pontifical secrecy.
At the Victorian Parliamentary hearings, Australian bishops accused their predecessors of “effectively facilitating” child sexual abuse, of being “naïve” and making “terrible mistakes.” But everything their predecessors did, misguided as it was, followed canon law.
In October the Truth, Justice and Healing Council, which speaks on behalf of the Church at the Federal Royal Commission, told the Australian community that it had been “kept in the dark for too long” about child sex abuse in the Church. The Council’s CEO went on to claim that the Council’s submission was “the most comprehensive document ever produced by the Church dealing with child sexual abuse. It is a warts-and-all history, going back many decades.”
Yet this history makes no mention of the biggest wart of all, canon law and pontifical secrecy; these are still strictly under wraps. People are being kept in the dark about canon law, the cornerstone of the cover-up, not just in Australia but everywhere.
Meanwhile, pontifical secrecy still prevails. The de facto privilege of clergy will continue wherever the Church leaders can get away with it.
Kieran Tapsell is a retired lawyer with degrees in Theology and Law. His book, Potiphar’s Wife: The Secret of the Holy Office and Child Sexual Abuse is to be published in May 2014.
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