Vatican task force offers help to church on abuse prevention

The Vatican is launching a task force of experts to help Catholic dioceses and religious orders develop guidelines to handle cases of sexual abuse by clergy and tend to survivors.

The initiative was proposed last year during Pope Francis’ summit on preventing abuse. It was considered necessary given Catholic leaders in some parts of the world — mostly poor, conflict-marred areas in Africa and Asia — have failed to comply with a 2011 Vatican directive to develop the guidelines.

Task force participants said on Friday that the aim is to provide legal expertise and help to dioceses and religious orders that simply don’t have the professional resources or have otherwise neglected to comply with the 2011 directive.

The guidelines are meant to establish procedures to receive complaints from victims and provide them with pastoral care, train church personnel in abuse prevention and child protection strategies, and follow the church’s internal legal procedures to investigate allegations.

The Vatican only requires allegations of abuse be reported in-house, not to police. The Vatican says church leaders must report to police only where civil laws require it.

The task force is the latest initiative by the Vatican to underline the global nature of clergy sexual abuse, after the Catholic hierarchy for decades insisted it was exclusively a problem in the English-speaking world. The scandal is now exploding in Francis’ native Latin America and staunchly Catholic Italy and Poland.

Another initiative that is expected to be unveiled soon is an instruction manual for bishops or religious superiors for conducting canonical investigations when they receive allegations against one of their priests. Bishops around the world have for decades failed to investigate or sanction abusers, considering the rape and molestation of children a moral failing as opposed to a crime.

The task force is made up mostly of canon lawyers and is headed by the four church leaders who organized Francis’ February 2019 summit on abuse, including the Vatican’s longtime sex crimes prosecutor Maltese Archbishop Charles Scicluna, and leading child protection expert, the Rev. Hans Zollner. Joined by Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich and Mumbai Cardinal Oswald Gracias, they report to the No. 2 in the Vatican’s secretariat of state, an indication of the central importance the Vatican is placing on the initiative.

The task force itself is composed of a coordinator, Dr Andrew Azzopardi, head of the Safeguarding Commission of the Maltese Bishops (established by the Archdiocese of Malta, the Diocese of Gozo, and the Conference of Religious Major Superiors); and a number of canon law experts of different nationalities. The coordinator will report quarterly to the Substitute for General Affairs of the Secretariat of State on the work undertaken by the task force.