VATICAN CITY
National Public Radio
July 16, 2020
By David Welna
The Vatican on Wednesday published a handbook for clergy and church lawyers that lays out the steps to follow when investigating and reporting alleged cases of sexual abuse of minors and others by priests, deacons and prelates.
A Vatican official described the “vademecum,” as the document is titled in Latin, as simply a “tool” for correctly conducting probes into such allegations.
“No new law is being promulgated, nor are new norms being issued,” Cardinal Louis Ladaria, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, writes in the in-house outlet Vatican News. “It is, instead, an ‘instruction manual’ that intends to help whoever has to deal with concrete cases from the beginning to the end.”
But the handbook does go further than the instructions Pope Francis issued in a May 2019 apostolic letter titled “You Are the Light of the World.” In that missive, the pontiff instructed church authorities to report suspected cases of sexual abuse to civil authorities when required to do so by local laws.
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