MALTA
Times of Malta
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”.
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.
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