Clergy sex abuse victims, advocates back Pope’s end of ‘pontifical secrecy’

By Marie Szanislo
BostHerald
December 17, 2019

https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/12/17/clergy-sex-abuse-victims-advocates-back-popes-end-of-pontifical-secrecy/

Pope Francis ponders during the weekly general audience at St. Peter’s square in the Vatican on November 21, 2018. Photo by Filippo MONTEFORTE

Pope Francis on Tuesday abolished the use of “pontifical secrecy” — the Vatican’s highest level of secrecy in clergy sexual abuse cases — a step that victims and their advocates say is long overdue and only one step toward protecting children and holding child molesters to account.

In abolishing the secret rule, the Pope was giving law enforcement what it could probably already obtain, given the legal power of subpoenas in many jurisdictions, said Boston attorney Mitchell Garabedian, who said he has represented more than 2,000 clergy sex abuse victims over 25 years.

“A truly independent civil authority should be created to oversee what is disclosed by the Catholic Church,” Garabedian said. “It is also now time for Pope Francis to mandate that crimes be reported to the police by bishops, religious superiors and others, and to make documents and testimony public with the appropriate redactions of victims’ names.”

The Vatican’s leading sex crimes investigator, Archbishop Charles Scicluna, said the reform was an “epochal decision” that will facilitate coordination with civil law enforcement and open up lines of communication with victims.

While documentation from the church’s in-house legal proceedings will still not become public, Scicluna said, the reform now removes any excuse to not cooperate with legitimate legal requests from prosecutors, police or other civil authorities.

Alexa MacPherson, who said she was abused by a priest at St. Margaret’s Parish in Dorchester from the ages of 3 to 9 during the late 1970s and early 1980s, dismissed that as “smoke and mirrors.”

“If there’s no action behind it, it’s meaningless,” she said.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, called a “welcome reform” the pope’s decision to also raise from 14 to 18 the cutoff age below which the Vatican considers pornographic images to be child pornography.

But “most urgently,” she added, “Pope Francis must enact true ‘zero tolerance’ for child abusers. This means requiring the permanent removal of every priest found guilty of child molestation. It’s a little-known, appalling fact that under universal church law, guilty priests still are allowed to remain in ministry.”