He praised the late Pope for promulgating the 2001 Motu Proprio “Sacramentorum sanctitatis” which updated and strengthened the Church’s laws for dealing with allegations and incidents of abuse.
He explained how the document had raised clerical abuse to the level of a “delicta graviora” or “grave crime” in Church law and, in doing so, took the issue to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. These rules have since been revised and strengthened by Pope Benedict XVI, he said.
“The law is clear,” said Mgsr. Scicluna, but “the faithful need to be convinced that ecclesial society is living under the governance of law.”
It is “not good enough,” he said, for the promotion of “peace and order in the community” that the law is simply clear but also that “people need to know that the law is being applied.”
The fourth principle proposed by Pope John Paul in his 1994 address was the duty of the Church “towards the common good.” In alleged cases of abuse, said Msgr. Scicluna, the Church would include the safety of children as a “paramount concern” which is essential to any understanding of “the common good.”
He told delegates that this included a “duty to cooperate with state authorities.”
“Sexual abuse of minors is not just a canonical delict or a breach of a Code of Conduct internal to an institution, whether it be religious or other. It is also a crime prosecuted by civil law,” he said.
The fifth and final principle of Pope John Paul II was that respect for the Church’s guidelines should not be distorted by “pastoral” concerns.
Mgsr. Scicluna recalled how in 1994 Pope John Paul had warned of “the temptation to lighten the heavy demands of observing the law in the name of a mistaken idea of compassion and mercy.”
The 2011 investigation into lapses of child safety in the Irish Diocese of Cloyne found that the former Vicar General of the diocese had not upheld the Irish Church’s 1996 guidelines on mandatory reporting as, he felt, they compromised his “Christian duty of pastoral care.”
Mgsr. Scicluna again quoted Pope John Paul’s advice from 1994 that “if the rights of others are at stake, mercy cannot be shown or received without addressing the obligations that correspond to these rights.”
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He concluded his address to the symposium by stating his belief that “the honest quest for truth and justice is the best response we can provide for the sad phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors by clerics.”