Pope Benedict reportedly defrocked 400 priests in 2 years

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News Bharati English    20-Jan-2014
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$img_titleVatican City, January 20: A Vatican document obtained by Associated Press shows that between 2011 and 2012, Pope Benedict XVI defrocked some 400 Roman Catholic priests for sexually molesting children.

The document, obtained on Friday, details the number of sexual-assault accusations levied against priests as well as the number who had been dismissed from church service following a church trial. The reports listed a significant increase in defrocked priests beginning in 2011, up from 171 in 2008 and 2009. According to the AP’s Twitter account, Vatican officials have confirmed the report as accurate.

The document, which was compiled by the Vatican to use at a U.N. committee in Geneva, drew the numbers from cases handled by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The report is technically public, but is rarely available outside of Catholic offices in Rome.

The data — 260 priests defrocked in 2011 and 124 in 2012, a total of 384 — represented a dramatic increase over the 171 priests defrocked in 2008 and 2009, says Associated Press report.

It was the first compilation of the number of priests forcibly removed for sex abuse by the Vatican's in-house procedures — and a canon lawyer said the real figure is likely far higher, since the numbers don't include sentences meted out by diocesan courts.

The Roman Catholic Church began its current internal discipline systems against pedophilia in 2001, when new procedures were put in place by Pope Benedict, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, in the face of widespread accusations that the church was not properly handling sexual-assault charges, but simply moving accused priests “from parish to parish.” The Congregation began publishing the results in 2005.

The spike started a year after the Vatican decided to double the statute of limitations on the crime, enabling victims who were in their late 30s to report abuse committed against them when they were children.

The Vatican has actually made some data public year by year in its annual reports. But an internal Vatican document prepared to help the Holy See defend itself before a U.N. committee this week in Geneva compiled the statistics over the course of several years. Analysis of the raw data cited in that document, which was obtained by the AP, confirmed the figures.

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva, referred to just one of the statistics in the course of eight hours of often pointed criticism and questioning Thursday from the U.N. human rights committee. He said 418 new child sex abuse cases were reported to the Vatican in 2012.

The Vatican initially said the AP report seemed to be a misinterpretation of the 418 figure. However, the Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, later issued a correction based on confirmation of the AP calculations by the Vatican's former sex crimes prosecutor, Monsignor Charles Scicluna.

The Vatican's annual report contains a wealth of information about the activities of its various offices, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases. Although public, the reports are not readily available or sold outside Rome and are usually found in Vatican offices or Catholic university libraries.

An AP review of a decade's worth of the reference books shows a remarkable evolution in the Holy See's in-house procedures to discipline pedophiles since 2001, when the Vatican ordered bishops to send cases of all credibly accused priests to Rome for review.

Before becoming pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took action after determining that bishops around the world weren't following church policy and putting accused clerics on trial in church tribunals. Instead, bishops routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish rather than subject them to canonical trials — or turn them over to police.

For centuries, the church has had its own in-house procedures to deal with priests who sexually abuse children. One of the chief accusations against the Vatican from victims is that bishops put the church's procedures ahead of civil law enforcement by suggesting that victims keep accusations quiet while they were dealt with internally.

The maximum penalty for a priest convicted by a church tribunal is essentially losing his job: being defrocked, or removed from the clerical state. There are no jail terms and nothing to prevent an offender from raping again.

Since the Church began recording these trials in 2005, the number of accusations and trials have steadily increased. Only 21 trials were launched in 2005, a number that more than doubled to 43 the following year. The number of accusations was even higher at 362 in 2006, though the number also includes some cases unrelated to sexual abuse.

After Ratzinger was elected pope, he kept the issue of pedophilia on the agenda. In 2008, Pope Benedict XVI travelled to the United States to address the issue. According to the Associated Press document, Benedict was “mortified” by the widespread abuse of children and reportedly could not understand “how priests could fail in such a way.”

 

That year, the Vatican announced the number of pedophile priests it had defrocked for the first time: 68 priests out of 191 reported cases in 2008. The numbers continued to rise, with 223 accusations and 103 defrocked in 2009. In 2010, the Vatican did not announce the number of priests it defrocked, but stated that it received 527 accusations of abuse. That year, the Congregation introduced new church laws to more easily defrock priests found guilty of abuse.

After the Congregation implemented the new rules, the number of defrocked priests skyrocketed. 260 priests were defrocked following 404 cases of abuse in 2011, and the following year saw an additional 124 priests defrocked. An additional 419 priests were reprimanded for abuse, but were not defrocked.

Though the Catholic Church has had its own discipline system for hundreds of years, it does not involve secular authorities in any way. If a priest is found guilty of sexually molesting a child in a church trial, he is simply defrocked and removed from his job.