ROME (ITALY)
The New York Times
December 17, 2019
By Elisabetta Povoledo
Church officials can now share information with secular law enforcement authorities. Critics said the confidentiality rule led to the concealment of abuse.
The Vatican on Tuesday said it would abolish the high level of secrecy it has applied to sexual-abuse accusations against clerics, ending a policy that critics said had often shielded priests from criminal punishment by the secular authorities.
Removing that cloak of confidentiality, the Roman Catholic Church is changing its stance to make it acceptable — but not required — to turn information about abuse claims over to the police, prosecutors and judges.
In recent years, church officials in the United States and some other countries have shared with civil authorities information about some sexual abuse allegations. But that cooperation, in theory, defied a decree adopted in 2001 that made the information a “pontifical secret” — the church’s most classified knowledge.
Victims and their advocates said the restrictions hampered civil authorities and helped conceal crimes, and they greeted Francis’ new instructions as a step forward.
“Things are decidedly changing,” said Francesco Zanardi, an Italian survivor of clerical abuse and the president of Rete l’Abuso, an Italian anti-abuse group.
Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a group that tracks abuse in the church, said the pope had taken “an overdue and desperately needed step.”
“For decades, pontifical secrecy has been an obstruction to civil justice, spurring bishops worldwide to thwart prosecutions of abusive priests,” Ms. Barrett Doyle said in a statement. She called changing the policy “a first step toward decreasing the anti-victim bias of canon law.”
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