The Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors has published its first annual report nearly a decade after Pope Francis established the Commission in 2014. In 2022, the pope directed the Commission to provide an annual assessment of safeguarding practices within the global Catholic Church, outlining areas of progress and key challenges that remain.
The report draws on data from local Churches, religious congregations, and the Roman Curia, offering a review of global efforts to protect minors and vulnerable adults, along with recommendations for standardized practices. Vatican News summarizes:
Ten years since its establishment, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors releases a report compiled by a dedicated study group that conducted extensive research across five continents. The report identifies progress in best practices as well as steps to be taken, calls for increased transparency in data collection, and highlights imbalances in local Churches regarding the availability of reporting structures and support services for victims.
The report calls for significant improvements in the Church’s handling of abuse cases, in its processes for bringing abusers to justice, and in its efforts to compensate and provide healing for survivors. It identifies failures by Church leadership, such as:
“Over its 10 years of service, the commission has seen church leaders being the object of past administrative actions and/or inactions which were a further source of evil for victims/survivors of sexual abuse. Such a reality reveals the need for a disciplinary or administrative procedure providing an efficient path towards the resignation or removal from a post.”
The New York Times provided an overview of the report’s findings:
The commission found that some countries demonstrated “a clear commitment to safeguarding.” Others lagged behind, in some cases showing “a troubling” lack of support for victims of abuse.
The report also called for better disciplinary measures for clerics who had erred and those who covered up transgressions, and greater transparency from the office that deals with sex abuse cases. It also affirmed the right to economic compensation.
The Times article also reported from the Vatican press conference:
Acknowledging the sex abuse crisis’s “incredible damage” to the church’s credibility, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, the commission’s president, described the report as a “snapshot of the journey of conversion that we have been on” toward “a transparent and accountable ministry.” But there is still “much to be done,” he said at a news conference at the Vatican on Tuesday.
Although this annual report is generally seen as a step forward in many ways, and should be commended for calling Church entities — including the disciplinary section of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — to greater consistency and transparency, many critics of the Church’s handling of abuse voiced continuing concerns. BishopAccountability founder Anne Barrett Doyle was quoted in an article in The Guardian, saying that the report “assesses window-dressing” and not the “reality on the ground.” She continued,
“It doesn’t focus on the central and devastating realities: that children in the Catholic church are still being sexually assaulted by clergy, and that universal church law still allows these priests to be reinstated if certain conditions are met. It doesn’t decry the fact that the process for reporting and investigating complicity is flawed, rife with conflict of interest and secrecy.”
Doyle also noted that the scope of the Commission’s mandate is limited. “It is not allowed to examine specific cases,” she told the Guardian. “The absurdity of this limitation – which surely is no accident – is that the commission cannot possibly do a true audit. The only safeguarding test that matters is whether bishops are removing abusers. This report doesn’t address that, because the commission itself is powerless to do so.”
Perhaps as a result of this limitation, the biggest abusive elephant in the room — the case of Fr. Marko Rupnik — is not mentioned in the annual report. The Pillar’s Luke Coppen wrote:
A year ago, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had requested the opening of the Rupnik case after the PCPM identified “serious problems” in the handling of the accusations against the Slovenian mosaic artist.
The Vatican has given no update since October 2023 on the case, which is assumed to be ongoing. Perhaps this lack of closure explains why Rupnik is not mentioned in the report. The PCPM may also be following its general practice of not addressing individual cases, focusing instead on the underlying principles in the battle against abuse.
The New York Times article also noted that many advocates for victims/survivors doubt that Church leaders are truly committed to changing:
“I can appreciate Pope Francis’s voice,” Francesco Zanardi, founder of Italian survivors group Rete L’Abuso (the Abuse Network) said. But many of his bishops “don’t listen in the end.”
He called the report “a house of cards built on sand.”
The article concluded with comments from Commission member and abuse survivor Juan Carlos Cruz, who
said in an interview that the report was by necessity incomplete, and was an initial document for the commission to build on and develop. It was not, he said, “a P.R. exercise,” otherwise he wouldn’t be a part of it.
“We talk so much about transparency and accountability and yet the data is so murky,” he said, adding that there were significant gaps in gathering information, which he said would be addressed. “I understand that it won’t satisfy everybody and it won’t satisfy survivors,” he said.
“It’s the first one, and it’s a start,” he said.
It seems that at the very least the publication of this annual report represents a modest step towards accountability from within the Church. But it seems that many of our leaders still need to take responsibility in addressing the abuse crisis and must act with honesty, vigilance, humility, consistency, and transparency when facing it.
Image: Vatican News
Mike Lewis is the founding managing editor of Where Peter Is. He and Jeannie Gaffigan co-host Field Hospital, a U.S. Catholic podcast.
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