Pope Francis on Saturday scrapped his proposed tribunal to prosecute bishops who covered up for pedophile priests and instead laid out legal procedures to remove them if the Vatican finds they were negligent.
The new procedures sought to answer long-standing demands by survivors of abuse that the Vatican hold bishops accountable for botching abuse cases. Victims have long accused bishops of covering up for pedophiles, moving rapists from parish to parish rather than reporting them to police — and suffering no consequences.
However, the new law was immediately criticized by survivors of abuse as essentially window dressing since there were already ways to investigate and dismiss bishops for wrongdoing — they were just rarely used against bishops who failed to protect their flocks from pedophiles.
In the law, Francis acknowledged that the church’s canonical code already allowed for a bishop to be removed for “grave reasons.” However, he said he wanted to precisely state that negligence in handling abuse cases counted as one of those reasons.
However, the statute makes no mention of a proposal approved by Francis last year to establish an accountability tribunal section inside the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to judge bishops accused of “abuse of office.”
Francis’ sex abuse advisory board had recommended that the Congregation prosecute negligent bishops because it already oversees actual sex abuse cases against clergy.
Francis and his nine cardinal advisers approved the proposal to great fanfare in June last year, pledging to provide the tribunal section with adequate staffing and resources. As recently as March, Francis’ chief adviser on sex abuse, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, said he was confident the proposal would go through and that a new secretary would be named for the congregation to run it.
However, the tribunal posed a host of legal and bureaucratic issues and ran into opposition from bishops and the Vatican bureaucracy.
In the end, Francis appears to have backed off and instead reminded the four Vatican offices that already handle bishop issues that they were also responsible for investigating and punishing negligence cases. The new law makes clear that a negligent act or omission on handling an abuse allegation was grounds for dismissal.
In the law, Francis said a bishop can be removed if his actions or omissions cause “grave harm” — physical, moral, spiritual or financial — to individuals or communities.
The bishop himself does not need to be morally guilty. It is enough if he is purely lacking in the diligence required of his office.
The procedures call for the Vatican to start an investigation when “serious evidence” is provided that a bishop was negligent. The bishop can defend himself. At the end of the investigation, the Vatican can prepare a decree removing the bishop or ask him to resign.
However, canon lawyers said such arm-twisting resignations do little to “repair scandal and restore justice,” which the church’s legal system is supposed to accomplish.
Any decision to remove the bishop must first be approved by the pope, who will be advised by a college of legal experts, the law says.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to