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The Vatican is making child protection a priority for new movements and lay associations. Its new focus extends its work to eliminate clerical sexual abuse and to strengthen diocesan bishops’ accountability.
Last month, the Vatican Dicastery (office) for Laity, the Family and Life met with about 100 representatives of Catholic associations and movements to develop abuse prevention and procedures for reporting and handling allegations.
Cardinal Kevin Farrell, who leads the Dicastery, told the representatives that by the end of December every movement and association in the church must turn in formal guidelines and protocols for reporting and preventing abuse cases.
All Catholic movements and associations for laypeople, which are officially recognised through Farrell’s office, were told in May last year to draft abuse guidelines.
Farrell says “too many” of the groups either have not responded or submitted inadequate protocols.
He says some Catholics think holding another meeting about abuse shows the scandal has become “a fixation,” “an unhealthy obsession” or “a pesky exaggeration.
“In truth, the logic is exactly the reverse,” he says.
“It is the sexual abuse of power (and) of conscience that is an evil, an unhealthy obsession, a real manipulation, that suffocates and frustrates even the best pastoral plans, obscuring the good that the church accomplishes.”
Farrell says developing protocols is only part of the process of “purging” the culture of abuse within the church.
The church needs a “change of mentality” to eradicate the sense of “taboo” that often led survivors of abuse to keep quiet. The same taboo caused many laymen and laywomen to look the other way, he says.
Linda Ghisoni, the undersecretary for laity at the Dicastery, read out the testimonies of three anonymous members of lay movements.
All three suffered abuse and were further harmed by their group’s code of silence.
One survivor says it was difficult to speak about the abuse while still being a part of the association. However, she says she understands her “silence aggravates guilt and hinders the truth, making me an accomplice of evil and sin.”
Another survivor, abused by two priests, says she felt she no longer had “access to God.”
Comments from critics, including “some bishops who continue to repeat that one of those priests is so good” are “a new betrayal that comes from within the church,”she says.
Ghisoni says these testimonies are “not a way of indulging some morbid curiosity, nor an exercise in pity, but involves our honesty and brings us to an encounter with the flesh of Christ that is inflicted with wounds that, as Pope Francis has repeatedly maintained, never disappear.”
Ghisoni says because of their influence on members’ identity, formation, growth and freedom, lay movements and associations must have clear rules and regulations that are designed to prevent abuse and allow members to report without fear of retribution or exclusion.
She says groups that boast of strict orthodoxy often have an authoritarian and restrictive managerial style, one that does not include their members in decision-making.
This style spreads “subliminal messages that excludes those who criticize,” she notes.
Groups without any real structure that have lax rules are also at risk of creating an environment where sexual abuse can thrive, she says.
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