ROME (ITALY)
Religion News Services
Dec. 20, 2019
By Claire Giangravé
When Pope Francis announced Tuesday (Dec. 17) that he had abolished pontifical secrecy for cases of clerical sexual abuse, some observers compared the move to a regime opening its secret files, bringing to light years of testimony and documents.
The new protocol will transform legal proceedings and the lives of abuse victims, those accused of abusing them and bishops in charge of exercising oversight.
“This is a tremendous step forward in transparency and the right of victims’ participation” in canonical trials and “also the rights of the accused,” Dutch canon lawyer Myriam Wijlens told Religion News Service in a phone interview Wednesday.
“There are only winners in this; there are no losers,” she added.
Wijlens, a professor of canon law and vice president at the University of Erfurt, knows a thing or two about the handling of sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church. She has been on the frontier of the clerical abuse crisis since 1987. Her investigations on behalf of bishops and the superiors of religious orders have involved numerous interviews with both sides of abuse cases, the results of which were usually sent to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the powerful office that has defended the church on doctrinal matters for centuries.
In 2008 Wijlens was chosen as the delegate to the World Council of Churches in Geneva by the Vatican department in charge of promoting Christian unity. Pope Francis named her to the Pontifical Council for the Protection of Minors, a sort of papal think tank on sexual abuse, in 2018.
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