Vatican issues sweeping new reforms to address sex abuse, bishop accountability

Pope Francis issued a sweeping set of global reforms Thursday aimed at reshaping how the Roman Catholic Church polices clergy sex abuse and holds its hierarchy accountable for failures to protect the flock.

The new church laws, set to go into effect June 1, require dioceses worldwide to create systems for receiving confidential abuse complaints.

They also provide whistle-blower protections for priests, nuns, and seminarians who report their bosses, and establish new procedures for conducting investigations when a bishop or cardinal is the subject of an abuse claim — a problem that has particularly vexed the church in the United States.

“We must continue to learn from the bitter lessons of the past,” Francis wrote in the introduction to his edict. To ensure that the church’s failures never happen again, he wrote, “it is good that procedures be universally adopted to prevent and combat these crimes that betray the trust of the faithful.”

The new regulations mark the most concrete steps Francis has taken in response to a crisis that has threatened to overwhelm his papacy. They arrive three months after he convened a worldwide summit of church leaders to develop solutions to the problem.

Many victims and their advocates in the U.S. panned that meeting when it ended in February with few specific reforms — especially after a year in which a scathing grand jury report in Pennsylvania condemned decades of cover-up, dozens of investigations were launched by state and federal authorities, and American Cardinal Theodore McCarrick was defrocked amid claims of sexual misconduct involving minors and adult seminarians.

Those critics welcomed some of the steps Francis took Thursday, while insisting that they did not go far enough. The edict outlines no specific penalties for those who fail to comply with its strictures, said Anne Barret Doyle, co-director of the advocacy group BishopAccountability.org

“It stipulates no penalties for those who ignore it, it mandates no transparency to the public, and it doesn’t require the permanent removal of abusers from ministry,” she said. "In other words, under the new law, it’s still entirely possible for a bishop to punish a child-molesting priest with a slap on the wrist and to keep his name hidden from the public.

>>> READ MORE: 5 takeaways from Pope Francis’ new reforms for handling clergy sex abuse

Still, several of the measures — outlined in a papal letter titled “Vos estis lux mundi” (“You are the light of the world”) — appeared to have been drafted in response to the specific scandals that have roiled the church within the last year.

Forcing an adult “by violence or threat or through abuse of authority” into sexual acts is now listed as a crime just as serious as abuse of a minor.

Meanwhile, the regulations also mandate that priests and religious sisters inform church authorities of actions their superiors might take “intended to interfere with or avoid civil investigations or canonical investigations.”

“No one in leadership is above the law,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the church’s top sex-abuse prosecutor, told reporters at a Vatican news conference. “There is no immunity.”

Many of the reforms unveiled Thursday have been in place in the U.S. since the early 2000s, when the nation’s prelates issued their own set of localized regulations as the first wave of the clergy sex abuse crisis rocked the American church.

For instance, the new rules require for the first time that all of the world’s 415,000 Catholic priests and 660,000 religious sisters report suspected abuse to their superiors — a policy similar to one adopted by U.S. dioceses for their own prelates nearly two decades ago.

But unlike the U.S. version, the Vatican stopped short of requiring dioceses to pass those allegations on to police, acknowledging that doing so could put priests in danger in parts of the world where Catholics are persecuted.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, whose office directed the investigation that led to last year’s landmark grand jury report, criticized the absence of a firm requirement to involve civil authorities.

“It’s encouraging to see a recognition and some action from the Vatican,” he said. “But yet, the correct place to report sexual abuse and cover-up is to law enforcement.”

American prelates appeared to have influenced the new policies in other significant ways, most notably in the new process established for investigating claims of abuse or cover-up involving a bishop.

Critics in the U.S. have long complained that bishops, who are accountable only to the pope, have escaped justice for failing to adequately respond to abuse or, in some cases, committing acts of sexual misconduct themselves.

Facing immense public pressure to act, the nation’s prelates had been set to vote on their own set of reforms to address that last fall — including a protocol for civilian-led investigations of bishops — before the Vatican ordered them to hold off.

The guidelines announced Thursday appeared to split the difference between that idea and an alternative floated at Francis’ abuse summit in February by Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago.

The new policy grants authority to investigate members of the hierarchy to local “metropolitan archbishops” — a title given to those prelates tasked with both leading an archdiocese and supervising bishops in nearby dioceses.

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, for example, is one of 34 metropolitan archbishops in the U.S. and presides over a province that includes the seven other Roman Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania.

Now, complaints against Pennsylvania bishops would be filed with Chaput. He would be required to report them to the Holy See and, if authorized to launch a preliminary investigation, complete it within 90 days.

The guidelines also establish protocols for situations in which the complaint is filed against the metropolitan archbishop himself. But in all cases, authority for any final decisions rests with the pope.

In a nod to the earlier U.S. proposal, the Vatican also carved out a role for lay Catholics to participate, saying that the metropolitan archbishops can rely on nonclerical experts and advisers.

The new protocol already has served as a model for at least one church-led investigation in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the pope appointed Baltimore Archbishop William Lori to lead a six-month investigation into sexual misconduct claims against Philadelphia native and former Wheeling-Charleston (W.Va.) Bishop Michael J. Bransfield that resulted in his preliminary suspension from ministry.

A final judgment on the case is pending at the Vatican.

In a statement Thursday, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said he was honored by the role the U.S. church has played in drafting and testing many of the policies being implemented worldwide.

He said: “The existing framework in the United States — including victim outreach, zero tolerance, reporting allegations to civil authorities, and lay expertise on review boards, among other measures — positions us readily to bring the Holy Father’s instructions to action.”