GENEVA (AP) — The Vatican revealed Tuesday that over the
past decade, it has defrocked 848 priests who raped or molested children
and sanctioned another 2,572 with lesser penalties, providing the first
ever breakdown of how it handled the more than 3,400 cases of abuse
reported to the Holy See since 2004.
The Vatican’s U.N. ambassador
in Geneva, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, released the figures during a
second day of grilling by a U.N. committee monitoring implementation of
the U.N. treaty against torture.
Tomasi insisted that the Holy See
was only obliged to abide by the torture treaty inside the tiny Vatican
City State, which has a population of only a few hundred people.
But
significantly, he didn’t dispute the committee’s contention that sexual
violence against children can be considered torture. Legal experts have
said that classifying sexual abuse as torture could expose the Catholic
Church to a new wave of lawsuits since torture cases in much of the
world don’t carry statutes of limitations.
Tomasi also provided
statistics about how the Holy See has adjudicated sex abuse cases for
the past decade. The Vatican in 2001 required bishops and religious
superiors to forward all credible cases of abuse to Rome for review
after determining that they were shuffling pedophile priests from
diocese to diocese rather than subjecting them to church trials. Only in
2010 did the Vatican explicitly tell bishops and superiors to also
report credible cases to police where local reporting laws require them
to.
The Vatican statistics are notable in that they show how the
peaks in numbers over the years — both of cases reported and sanctions
meted out — roughly parallels the years in which abuse scandals were in
the news. And they showed that far from diminishing in recent years, the
number of cases reported annually to the Vatican has remained a fairly
constant 400 or so since 2010, the last year the scandal erupted in
public around the globe. These cases, however, concern mostly abuse that
occurred decades ago.
The Associated Press reported in January
that then-Pope Benedict XVI had defrocked 384 priests in the final two
years of his pontificate, citing documentation that Tomasi’s delegation
had prepared for another U.N. hearing monitoring a treaty on the rights
of children. That documentation matched data contained in the Vatican’s
statistical yearbooks.
Tomasi told the AP on Tuesday that the
January figures were "incomplete" and that the data he provided to the
U.N. committee Tuesday was the first ever comprehensive year-by-year
breakdown of cases reported and adjudicated. The figures, however, only
cover cases handled directly by the Holy See, not those handled by local
diocesan tribunals, meaning the total number of sanctioned priests is
likely far higher.
The data showed that since 2004, the Vatican
had received some 3,400 cases, had defrocked 848 priests and sanctioned
another 2,572 to lesser penalties.
There are over 410,000 Catholic priests around the world, according to the Catholic News Service.
The
latest spike began in 2010, when 464 cases were reported, more than
twice the amount in 2009. Starting in that same year, the Vatican began
resorting more and more to the lesser penalty of sentencing accused
priests to a lifetime of penance and prayer rather than defrocking them.
The Vatican often metes out such sentences for elderly or infirm
priests, since defrocking them would essentially render them destitute
in their final years.
Prior to 2010, these lesser sanctions were only handed out to about 100 or so priests each year.
Tomassi
stressed the lesser sanctions still amounted to punishment and the
abuser was "put in a place where he doesn’t have any contact with the
children."
The main U.S. victim’s group, SNAP, praised the Vatican
for releasing the data, saying "Every step toward more transparency
about clergy sex crimes and coverups is good." But it called the numbers
"meaningless" and urged the Vatican to release the names and
whereabouts of molesters.
Nick Cafardi, a U.S. canon lawyer and
former chairman of the U.S. bishops’ lay review board that monitored
clerical abuse, said the statistics clearly showed a positive evolution
in how the church dealt with the abuse problem.
"Given where the
church came from — with the pendulum swung squarely to the side of the
accused priest whose explanations were almost always believed — this is a
move away from that and more toward giving credibility to victims,
which is progress," he said. "Maybe not perfect progress, but progress."
Tomasi’s
appearance marked the second time this year that the Vatican has been
hauled before a U.N. committee to face uncomfortable questions about how
it has handled the crisis of priests who raped and molested tens of
thousands of children, and the bishops who covered up for them. The
Vatican was required to appear as a signatory to U.N. treaties.
The
vice-chair of the committee, Felice Gaer, pressed Tomasi to acknowledge
whether the Holy See considered sexual abuse to be a form of torture.
She cited decisions from many international bodies, including the U.N.
tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda, which have held that sexual
violence is indeed a form of torture.
"I’m not a lawyer," Tomasi
said. But he didn’t dispute the contention, saying merely that the
alleged torture and the behavior of the person inflicting it must be
"consistent with the definition of the convention."
The U.N.
convention defines torture as "any act by which severe pain or
suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a
person" to obtain information, to punish or coerce and is inflicted with
the "consent or acquiescence" of a public official.
Gaer said
afterward that she considered Tomasi’s response to be a clear admission
by the Holy See that sexual violence can be a form of torture.
Victims’
advocates and legal groups have said the Catholic Church could be
exposed to a new round of litigation if courts agree that abuse can
constitute torture. Other legal experts, however, have expressed doubts
that U.S. courts would be swayed by an attempt to reclassify rape as
torture merely to get around the statute of limitations. The statute
issue has proved to be a major stumbling block for many victims, since
many are unable to cope with the trauma of the abuse until it’s too late
to pursue civil damages.
"The Vatican has long minimized these
offenses and the resulting harm," said Pam Spees, a senior attorney at
the Center for Constitutional Rights, which provided documentation to
the U.N. committee detailing the scope of the clerical abuse problem.
"But the committee’s recognition (of abuse as a form of torture) could
help open additional channels for victims to seek justice and
reparations, including, potentially, relief from restrictive statutes of
limitations and civil remedies, all of which contributes to preventing
more harm."
Tomasi acknowledged that there were problems in the
past, including when priests were transferred from diocese to diocese
after psychiatrists gave them a clean bill of health, thinking that a
pedophile could be cured with therapy.
"The culture at the time would allow this to happen," he said. "Unfortunately, that was a
mistake as experience has shown."
He
told the committee that "there is no climate of impunity but there is a
total commitment to clean the house" and prevent more abuse.
"I
think we have crossed a threshold … in our evolution of the approach
to these problems," he concluded. "It’s clear that the issue of sexual
abuse of children, which is a worldwide plague and scourge, has been
addressed in the last 10 years by the church in a systematic,
comprehensive, constructive way."
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Winfield reported from Rome.