A secretive Vatican department has opened its doors to AP, revealing that it is overwhelmed by clergy abuse cases.
In this Monday, Dec. 9, 2019 photo, Monsignor John Kennedy, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith discipline section, speaks during an interview on the terrace of the section's offices at the Vatican. "We're effectively seeing a tsunami of cases at the moment, particularly from countries where we never heard from ," Kennedy said, referring to allegations of abuse that occurred for the most part years or decades ago.
“We’re effectively seeing a tsunami of cases at the moment, particularly from countries where we never heard from ,” Kennedy said, referring to allegations of abuse that occurred for the most part years or decades ago. Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Italy and Poland have joined the U.S. among the countries with the most cases arriving at the congregation, known as the CDF.
“I suppose if I weren’t a priest and if I had a child who were abused, I’d probably stop going to Mass,” said Kennedy, who saw first-hand how the church in his native Ireland lost its credibility over the abuse scandal. In the past, when the CDF was known as the Holy Office or the Sacred Roman and Universal Inquisition, such church punishments involved burnings at the stake for heretics and publishing lists of banned books that the faithful were forbidden to read.
By then, church authorities had known for decades that the Rev. Earl Bierman groped young boys, and they had sent him off for therapy. But his bishops kept putting him back in ministry, where he is believed to have abused upwards of 70 children. A Kentucky jury convicted him in 1993 and sentenced him to 20 years in prison, where he died in 2005.“It just made me angry,” said Peloquin, who now counsels victims from a faith-based perspective that emphasizes forgiveness in healing.
Over the ensuing months and years, the bishop continues the investigation in consultation with the CDF. Eventually the bishop reaches a verdict and a sanction, up to and including dismissal from the clerical state, or laicization. The room is dominated by a massive wooden crucifix on the wall that faces St. Peter’s Basilica, and, in each corner of the room, a closed-circuit TV camera peering down on CDF staff.
Nearly 20 years after the CDF assumed responsibility for the cases, it has processed 6,000 abuse cases, and at one point Francis lamented that it had a backlog of 2,000. But the CDF now must cope with the globalization of the scandal that in 2001 seemed to be largely confined to the English-speaking world.
Not even in the U.S., which has the most stringent reporting mechanisms in place, is there any way to ensure that bishops are forwarding allegations to the CDF as required. St. John Paul II decreed that abuse cases would be kept under such tight secrecy in 2001, and defenders argued it was the best way to protect the privacy of the victim, the reputation of the accused and the integrity of the process.
The argument was striking, given that it amounted to an explicit admission that bishops had used the pontifical secret as an excuse to refuse cooperation when prosecutors, police or civil authorities demanded internal paperwork. “Canonical science doesn’t only grow and develop from a reflection by experts or the production of new laws, but also by jurisprudence, the way of interpreting the law by judges and lawyers,” he told a 2017 conference.
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