Peter Isley, victim of clergy sexual abuse and a spokesperson for "End Clergy Abuse" responded to the 21 reflection points, calling them "not very concrete points."
"I'll tell you what the roadmap in here is, it's a circle," he told journalists Feb. 21.
Isley was vocal in his opinion that the ideas presented in the list of reflection points do not go far enough in implementing "zero tolerance" against priests who have abused minors or bishops who have covered it up. "There is nothing there that wasn't there yesterday," he stated.
Referencing a point in the list, he said, "They put together a handbook [when] this is about the rape and sexual abuse of children!"
Isley added that he believes a priest who has abused a minor "has betrayed the priesthood," and should not only be removed from ministry, but should have the "honor" of priesthood taken away through laicization.
If you are a bishop, "you make very, very sure, that if your priest has assaulted a child, and you know he has, that he's not going to harm a child in the Catholic Church ever, ever, ever again," he said.
"You take that man out of ministry, that's the first thing, because he could harm a child. What kind of pastor wouldn't do that?"
Scicluna said in the press conference that "punishment needs to take care of the common good, so they [clerics found guilty of sexual abuse of minors] cannot be in active ministry," echoing a reflection point that says: "Decide that priests and bishops guilty of sexual abuse of minors leave public ministry."
He added that in his opinion, however, the decision to dismiss a priest from the clerical state, also called laicization, should be determined on a case-by-case basis.
At the presser, Scicluna also noted that while there is currently no compiled statistics on abuse cases being handled in the CDF, the material exists. He said that he recently spoke with Cardinal Luis Ladaria, CDF prefect, and he said the possibility exists for those statistics to be compiled, contextualized, and published "in the near future."
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency's senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.