Potiphar’s Wife 2nd Edition by Kieran Tapsell

For 1,500 years, the Catholic Church accepted that child sexual abuse was not only a sin but a civil crime, deserving of imprisonment and worse. From the 12th century, onwards, seven Council and papal decrees required clergy who sexually abused children to be handed over to the civil authorities for punishment. In 1917, the first Code of Canon Law abolished these papal and Council decrees. Then in 1922, Pope Pius XI issued his Instruction, Crimen Sollicitationis, imposing the strictest secrecy over allegations of child sexual abuse by clergy with no exceptions for reporting the allegations to the civil authorities. The punishment for breach of the secret was automatic excommunication from the Church, which could only be lifted by the pope personally. The Church had revived by the use of secrecy the medieval privilege of clergy whereby they would only be tried in the canonical courts. If the State did not know about these crimes, there would be no prosecutions. Five subsequent popes continued and expanded the cover up. Secrecy was not the only problem. The 1983 Code of Canon Law made it almost impossible for the Church to dismiss a priest child sex abuser without his consent. They were shifted around where they continued to abuse more children. In 2017, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse recommended the abolition of the pontifical secret over child sexual abuse and reforms to the dysfunctional disciplinary system. In 2019, Pope Francis abolished the pontifical secret for child sexual abuse and made some changes to the disciplinary system. The Vatican has not acted on the Royal Commission’s recommendation that it publish its disciplinary judgments and the reasons for them in child sex abuse cases. The pontifical secret has gone, but the Vatican is using the excuse of ‘office confidentiality’ to cover up abuse and avoid scrutiny of the Church’s disciplinary decisions.