UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
In my previous posting, I referred to a report Fr. Thomas Reese has published at National Catholic Reporter regarding Bishop Charles Scicluna’s recent address to the Canon Law Society of America. Scicluna was previously the Promoter of Justice for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the Vatican. In that capacity, he was, as Reese notes, roughly the equivalent of the Vatican’s “chief prosecutor” for cases of clerical abuse in the Catholic church.
As I read what Scicluna has to say about how canon law addresses abuse cases, I’m struck by the following:
1. The emphasis of Scicluna’s reading of canon law (and this reflects the emphasis of canon law itself) is far and away skewed in the direction of protecting the rights and serving the needs of clerics–while the rights and needs of lay Catholics, and notably of lay Catholics abused by clerics, are only distantly addressed by canon law.
2. Scicluna notes that canon law envisages three ends in any process considering the guilt of a cleric: these are “reparation of scandal, restitution of justice and the conversion of the accused.” Only the second of these ends can in any way be said to address the needs of those abused by priests, and it does so only in a glancing way.
3. What’s very clear in Scicluna’s presentation is that canon law itself sees the primary problems in an abuse case as tamping down all reports that can lead to scandal and as “converting” the priest himself. Canon law has almost no room at all for considering the needs of lay Catholics who have been sexually abused by a priest, or for addressing the hurts and mending the injuries done to those who have been abused.
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