A Church on the Right Path

After many years and several false starts, the Vatican is finally on the right track in addressing the difficult issue of sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church.

The publication of the statutes for the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors formalises, at least for the coming three years, the Holy See’s strategy on enforcing standards and regulations designed to keep children safe from predators in the Church, and governs how the Church is to act on cases of abuse and on failures in responding to reports of such abuse.

The composition of the pontifical commission is crucial: besides the president and the secretary, who must be clerics, all members are specialists in fields relating to sexual abuse. The inclusion of two abuse survivors is absolutely essential.

Their membership gives the commission a credibility which all previous Vatican efforts lacked. Should the commission fail to move towards the objectives it has set, or otherwise act with compromised integrity, the two survivor members, Marie Collins and Peter Saunders, will no doubt raise their objections.

Should they resign from the commission in an act of protest, the commission’s credibility—and therefore the Church’s—would be fundamentally damaged.

There will be points of friction. When one of them, Mr Saunders, publicly and forcefully voiced his suspicion that the powerful Cardinal George Pell was involved in the cover-up of abuse, the Vatican was visibly irritated.

This tension is always going to be an eventuality: Mr Saunders and Ms Collins are not serving on the commission as window dressing. They are willing to help the Church get things right, providing an indispensable service. The trade-off is that the Vatican has no authority over these commission members.

The commission reports directly to the pope, releasing it from interference from other bodies within the Roman curia. But that does not guarantee the cooperation of the departments concerned.

Nonetheless, it must be clearly understood: any act by Catholic officials, in the Vatican and in dioceses, which does not communicate that the Church is uncompromisingly on the side of the survivors of abuse, the protection of children and justice, fails the Body of Christ.

Much progress has been made already in the Church’s response to the sexual abuse scandals and their cover-ups and mishandling which filled the headlines in the first decade of this century.

In the 13 years since the scandal first erupted in Boston, the Church has seen a profound change in attitudes. Initially many Church leaders, and many of the faithful, were often excessively defensive. Some even blamed the press for overplaying the scandal. But even then there were high-ranking Catholic voices who proposed to thank the media for uncovering the scandal.

Pope Benedict XVI did much to address the scandal, by introducing new regulations and by seeking personal contact with abuse survivors. The reforms he instituted led to the adoption of strict protocols by many bishops’ conferences (Southern Africa’s was a leading light in that process).

Benedict’s emotional encounters with abuse survivors did much to present them not as a problem but as people who were violated and betrayed. The pope emeritus is not given due credit for this, and has even been the target of much gratuitous slander.

But not all criticism has been unfair. Many critics saw Pope Benedict’s reforms as being too little and too late, weighed down by conflicting interests within the hierarchy. Indeed, it may be argued that something like Pope Francis’ Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors should have been instituted a decade ago.

While today the Church cannot be accused of tolerating sexual abuse and clearly is reforming itself on that issue, there is truth in the criticism that the Church has not accounted adequately for the past.

For the most part, bishops and other officials who engaged in cover-ups or otherwise failed to protect minors from predators have not been held to account, never mind having been removed from their positions.

The suggestion that the Church might set up something akin to a truth and reconciliation commission therefore merits further consideration — not as a device to punish and humiliate but as a means of healing.