Veteran campaigner Marie Collins has expressed her disappointment at the changes to the Catholic Church’s penal code announced by the Vatican on Tuesday.
The new rules will force bishops to take action action against clerics who abuse minors and vulnerable adults or else lose office.
The code explicitly accepts that adults, and not only children, can be victimised by priests, while it also orders penalties for offending laypeople, such as principals or teachers in Catholic-run schools, or parish lay staff.
Priests who engage in sexual acts with anyone – not just a minor or one who lacks the use of reason – can be defrocked if they used “force, threats or abuse of his authority” to engage in sexual acts, the code states.
“It’s a very disappointing document, no zero tolerance, no mandatory reporting,” she told Newstalk’s Pat Kenny show.
Ms Collins said she had been hoping that the church’s attitude that children and women were “temptresses” would be “dead and gone”. It was not, she said, that attitude was still there, the Vatican was further behind than any other part of the church.
Parts of the penal code “jumped out” at her, she added. One was that clergy could be punished very severely if they did not report internally to the Church authorities, “but there was no mention whatsoever of them having to report to civil authorities”, so nothing had changed there, she said.
“The problem with it from my view is that there are lists of penalties for various infringements and offences, but nowhere does it say they will be applied or they must be applied.
“The one that really sticks with me is, as far as abusing a child is concerned, it says that a priest can be removed from office, he can be laicised, where the case calls for it, now that wording for me means that it will be left to a judgment call to the individual bishops, how they actually punish a priest, which means you don’t have any consistency or standard across the church.
“That’s where it’s always been, there’s no change, it depends on the goodwill of the bishop in the area of the priest.”
One section of the document that upset her, was where it said that a penalty could be diminished if the offence occurred “in the heat of passion” – “that really has no place in a document like this in my view.”
Ms Collins said that caveats “litter” the document. “If you take the headlines out of it, it looks very good, it looks as if the church is moving on, but when you read it in detail, it’s not.”
Section against children
An example that really angered her and would anger many survivors, she said, was in the section against children.
“It says that if a person, a priest, commits an offence against the sixth commandment of the decalogue (thou shall not commit adultery) with a minor — what has committing adultery got to do with child abuse?
“By saying with a minor it’s suggesting that the minor is a willing participant or has somehow given consent.
“That’s just inappropriate and absolutely has no place here.”
Ms Collins pointed out that the bishops in England and Wales had put in a formal request to the Vatican not to use this language as they had used it before.
“They were asked at a press conference in the Vatican yesterday why they used it and they said it was tradition. That just shows where we’re still at with the Vatican.