AUSTRALIA
ABC – Religion and Ethics Report
[with audio]
[Crimen Sollicitationis – 1962]
[Crimen Sollicitationis – 1922 – with notes from Thomas Doyle, O.P., J.C.D.]
Friday 6 June 2014
Noel Debien and Tiger Web
For 80 years, the Catholic Church did more than discourage the reporting of child sexual abuse, it enforced a policy of strict and absolute secrecy, punishable by excommunication. Noel Debien and Tiger Webb report on ‘crimen sollicitationis’, a papal decree with direct practical effects long after it was repealed.
This isn’t a conspiracy.’
Kieran Tapsell is adamant—it’s simply too big for that: ‘You can’t have a conspiracy of 5000 bishops.’
Tapsell is talking about the air of secrecy surrounding the Catholic Church’s response to allegations of clerical sex abuse. For him, the reason for this secrecy isn’t conspiratorial; it’s the result of a clearly defined canon law. This argument makes up the bulk of his new book, Potiphar’s Wife: the Vatican’s Secret and Child Sexual Abuse.
‘I don’t like using words like smoking guns,’ Tapsell says, ‘but canon law imposes secrecy, and the law is there to be obeyed.’
It wasn’t always thus: for most of the two millennia the Catholic Church has been in business, priests committing the heinous crime of sexual abuse were dismissed from the Church and handed over to the civil authorities. That changed in 1922 under Pope Pius XI, with the secret issue of one document: crimen sollicitationis.
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