Vatican Issues First Report on Sexual Abuse, to Immediate Criticism

The report is intended to assess efforts by the Roman Catholic Church to safeguard minors and others. Advocates for survivors called it an exercise in obfuscation.

Ten years after it was established, a Vatican commission on clerical sexual abuse issued its first report on Tuesday, a limited step in self-accounting by some bishops that was immediately criticized by victims advocates as toothless and lacking independent verification.

Since the clerical abuse scandal erupted into the mainstream media two decades ago, the church has struggled to put in place effective measures around the world to end abuse and hold the church hierarchy accountable when it was involved in covering up cases.

The Vatican group, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, was formed in 2014 to advise Pope Francis on how best to protect minors and vulnerable adults from sexual predators among the clergy. Last year, Francis also charged the commission with verifying that countries were following a new church law that set out rules for reporting and combating clerical sexual abuse.

The report issued Tuesday was the first time the Vatican had made public the results of its efforts to improve safeguarding policies and procedures.

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.

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.

Leading advocates for abuse survivors said the report did not provide the transparency that they have long demanded from the church.

“All they’re doing is collecting information from highly prejudiced sources,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, who has tracked clergy abuse over decades as a co-director of the BishopAccountability.org website.

“I think this report will simply add more smoke and obfuscation around the church’s global handling of abuse,” she said. “It’s going to create the impression that they’re now protecting children when that is absolutely not the case.”

Other critics likened the bishops’ reports to the commission to mere homework being presented to the teacher. They said the laws did not go far enough, demanding zero tolerance for clerics who abuse and superiors who covered it up. Others said compliance was still weak.

“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.”

Since its inception, the commission has faced strong criticism over its mandate, capabilities and funding. Several high-profile members quit in protest, including two survivors of clerical abuse who had accused the Vatican of stonewalling.

Last year, the Rev. Hans Zollner, a German Jesuit who is arguably the Catholic Church’s leading expert on anti-abuse efforts, also quit, excoriating the commission for failing to provide “responsibility, compliance, accountability and transparency.”

On Tuesday, Cardinal O’Malley said the report was part of a journey, from a “dark period” in the recent past when church leaders “failed abuse victims,” and hoped it was the beginning of a new chapter of uniform standards. “We believe change is taking place,” he said, though it could often be “an uphill climb.”

The report had some key recommendations. It said that the church had to better discipline clerics who had been found guilty of abuse or a coverup but had not been removed, allowing them to cause “additional harm.”

“Such a reality reveals the need for a disciplinary or administrative proceeding that provides an efficient path for resignation or removal from office,” the report said. And it reiterated “the importance of compensation” for survivors of abuse, and also “public apologies.”

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the commission member in charge of the report, said that next year’s edition would “delve more deeply into the whole issue of reparation.”

The report stated it was “not intended as an audit of the incidence of abuse” in church contexts because of “time and capacity constraints” and “a lack of reliable data in some countries, most notably reliable statistics on the number of children who are sexually abused.” Instead, the focus had been on the policies, procedures and mechanisms to keep children and vulnerable adults safe.

Ms. de Boer-Buquicchio acknowledged that the commission had to “significantly improve” its “data verification through cross-references with external sources.”

In some cases, the report listed challenges to putting in place safeguarding practices, among them “cultural barriers to reporting abuse,” the “prioritization” of the church’s “reputation over survivor support” and “lack of cultural sensitization to the phenomenon of abuse.”

In some cases, collaboration with the commission was disappointing. For example, only 20 of 98 local churches in Mexico had responded to a request to fill out a questionnaire. “Obviously we were disappointed,” Cardinal O’Malley said. But in his meetings with the Mexican bishops, he said, he was “impressed with how seriously they were taking the commission.”

The commission’s secretary, Bishop Luis Manuel Alí Herrera, said these problems existed elsewhere too. “But little by little,” there had been a significant increase in participation as local churches came to understand “how important it was to respond to these questions,” he said.

Cardinal O’Malley said that the commission had focused on the so-called global south, “where there is practically no data at all.” In much of Africa, the report noted, safeguarding was “a new concept,” and “cultural norms of silence, secrecy and denial” hindered its implementation. The commission had focused on “under-resourced churches” in the global south to help them improve safeguarding programs, the cardinal said

-The report also examined the Vatican’s doctrinal office in charge of dealing with abuse cases and called for greater transparency, specifying that it could shorten the length of canonical trials, work more efficiently with local authorities and be less secretive.

It also called for better training on safeguarding for those who work in seminaries, and a complete psychological assessment of those aspiring to become priests.

A Vatican spokesman, Matteo Bruni, said Tuesday that future reports would be issued annually.

National bishops’ conferences are to present reports on their safeguarding practices to the commission.

In the past, several countries issued reports on clerical abuse, a few scouring their archives to go back decades. Only a handful countries, among them the United States, have been issuing annual reports on clerical abuse cases.

Juan Carlos Cruz, a commission member as well as an abuse survivor, 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.