The Case for the Prosecution

Times of Malta
May 6, 2013

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20130504/opinion/The-case-for-the-prosecution.468268

When he was still the Vatican’s chief prosecutor in clerical abuse cases, Monsignor Charles Scicluna stated that the victims of clerical sex abuse at the St Joseph’s Home in Santa Venera deserved compensation, urging the Curia to set up a “fund which could go beyond the demands of damages granted by law”.

It is the Church and the Missionary Society of St Paul that should bear legal liability for these paedophile crimes

Later, on promotion to Auxiliary Bishop, he qualified this, saying that this was the “personal responsibility” of those who caused the damage. He said it was “unfair” to make the Church “vicariously liable” (that is, liable for the criminal acts of another because the institution has a particular legal relationship to the person who acted negligently or criminally) because the crimes were committed by individual priests, not the Church community as an institution.

The Church is cynically hiding behind the law in order to force 11 financially weak victims to desist from pursuing their rightful case for compensation.

In the immediate aftermath of the conviction of Godwin Scerri and Charles Pulis 20 months ago, Archbishop Paul Cremona had also publicly accepted responsibility for what had happened. He discussed financial compensation. But he reneged on this on the spurious grounds that the Church “bore no legal responsibility for what had happened to boys in the care of a religious order”.

Fair play, natural justice and, overridingly, the Church’s moral responsibility alone should suffice to be outraged at such a line of argument.

In August 2011, two priests were sentenced to imprisonment for sexually abusing 11 boys placed in their care at St Joseph’s Home in Santa Venera. Pulis and Scerri, both members of the Missionary Society of St Paul, had sexually molested the victims, in ways too disgusting to describe here, over a long period.

When Pulis was reported by a social worker, who had caught him at the home lying on the bed in his vest and boxer shorts with a young boy on top of him, the Missionary Society of St Paul chose to believe the priest, who denied the accusation, and not the care worker.

When Scerri escaped from Canada in 1993 to evade police arrest on charges that he had abused a young boy for four years, he was welcomed back to the local Missionary Society of St Paul without demur. The Society totally disregarded the Canadian arrest warrant and the serious charges against him. Instead, he was given a job at St Joseph’s Home, including unlimited and unsupervised access to young boys.

Father Conrad Sciberras, another member of the Missionary Society of St Paul, escaped legal prosecution because his alleged crimes were time-barred. He still lives, I understand, with the Missionary Society. He has not been defrocked. Brother Joseph Bonnet, another of the four priests investigated in connection with abuse in St Joseph’s Home, died before the case against him came to court. He had not been defrocked.

The case for the prosecution against the Maltese Church is clear-cut. The Church knew about, supported and initially stood by these paedophile priests and by its actions effectively condoned what they did for years, thereby placing vulnerable boys in harm’s way. The Church failed abysmally in its duty of care to the children in the home.

There is a direct and unarguable legal case for the Church to pay compensation.

The line of responsibility, from the priests in the home who committed these crimes, up through the hierarchy of the Missionary Society of St Paul in Malta, to the Curia and the Archbishop is clear and unequivocal.

It is inconceivable that the reports of what happened at the home were not known right up the chain of ecclesiastical command, not only the circumstances of Scerri’s return from Canada, but also the social worker’s report of what he had witnessed Pulis doing. The ultimate responsibility for the care provided in this home for young orphaned boys clearly rested with the Church, as it does with the other charitable homes it runs.

The role of the Archbishop of the diocese, his intimate relationship in this small island with what goes on in the Church’s charitable institutions, his knowledge of the activities in the home and the control exercised over individual priests within it cannot be denied. The Archbishop has ultimate authority over all pastoral or clerical activities performed by priests anywhere in his diocese.

The Church had direct responsibility for the four priests who caused the criminal injuries to the 11 victims. It was the Church, through the Missionary Society of St Paul, that appointed them to their positions of trust, which they then horribly abused.

The Maltese Church is utterly accountable. It is the Church and the Missionary Society of St Paul which had day-to-day responsibility for what happened at the home, that should bear legal liability for these paedophile crimes. This must in all justice include financial compensation.

The Church cannot, and in all charity should not, try to hide behind the law as an excuse for not paying financial compensation to the victims of sex abuse by paedophile priests carried out in one of its homes without laying itself open to charges of hypocrisy and worse: moral cowardice and a cynical act of injustice to avoid paying compensation.

A wise Church, wishing to put this dreadful business behind it, would announce the setting up of a Victim Compensation Fund, as proposed by Bishop Scicluna. It would ensure that claims are managed with the minimum of process and cost to the victims. In line with what has happened elsewhere, from Ireland to the US, to Belgium, to Australia and further afield, the 11 victims have a right to justice, healing and financial compensation for the harm they have suffered at the hands of the Church. The case for the prosecution is unanswerable.

The Maltese Church has failed the victims once. It must not fail them a second time.