Pope defrocked 384 in 2 years

Benedict’s tally of ousters for child sex abuse took jump

Pope Benedict XVI increased defrockings for child sexual abuse beginning in 2011, Vatican statistics show.
Pope Benedict XVI increased defrockings for child sexual abuse beginning in 2011, Vatican statistics show.

VATICAN CITY - A document obtained by The Associated Press on Friday shows Pope Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests in just two years for sexually molesting children.

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AP

An image shows part of an internal Vatican document the Vatican’s U.N. ambassador, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, used in Geneva during Thursday’s hearing on the rights of children. Tomasi cited some of the 2012 figures in the document, which was prepared to help the Holy See defend itself regarding the sexual abuse of children.

The statistics for 2011 and 2012 show an increase from the 171 priests removed in2008 and 2009, when the Vatican first provided details on the number of priests who had been defrocked. Prior to that, it had only publicly revealed the number of purported cases of sexual abuse it had received and the number of trials it had authorized.

The document was prepared from data the Vatican had been collecting and was compiled to help the Holy See defend itself before a United Nations committee this week in Geneva.

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 oftentimes pointed criticism and questioning from the U.N. human-rights committee.

The numbers were confirmed by the Vatican on Friday and were based on statistics published in its annual reports about the activities of its various offices, including the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex-abuse cases.

An AP review of the reference books shows an 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.

Then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took action after determining that bishops around the world weren’t following church law to put accused clerics on trial in church tribunals. Bishops routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish rather than subject them to canonical trials or report them 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 from victims is that bishops put the church’s procedures ahead of civil law enforcement by often suggesting 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 abusing again.

According to the 2001 norms Ratzinger pushed through and subsequent updates, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith reviews each case sent to Rome and then instructs bishops how to proceed, either by launching an administrative process against the priest if the evidence is overwhelming or holding a church trial. At every step of the way the priest is allowed to defend himself.

A total of 555 priests were defrocked from 2008 to 2012, according to the Vatican figures, though data from 2010 was not included.

The Rev. Davide Cito, a canon lawyer at Rome’s Pontifical Holy Cross University who has helped prosecute abuse cases for the Vatican, said the real number may be far higher. The figures in the Vatican’s annual report only refer to the outcome of cases sent to the pope.

But individual dioceses also can remove priests from the clerical state as the result of a canonical trial in which the priest is found guilty, Cito said.

“There can also be more without the intervention of the pope,” he said. “They don’t tell us the number, so there’s no way to know.”

Victims groups said the spike in cases appeared to be the result of victims gaining the strength to come forward and denounce abusive priests. They demanded the Vatican start sanctioning bishops who covered up for the abuse, too.

“Here’s the number Catholics should remember: zero. That’s how many Catholic supervisors have been punished, worldwide, for enabling and hiding horrific clergy sex crimes,” said David Clohessy of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, the main U.S. victims group. “The pope must start defrocking clerics who cover up sex crimes, not just clerics who commit them.”

The Congregation started reporting numbers only in 2005, which is where Tomasi’s spreadsheet starts. U.N. officials said Friday that the committee has not received the document.

In 2005, the Congregation authorized bishops to launch church trials against 21 accused clerics and reported that its appeals court had handled two cases. It didn’t say what the verdicts were, according to the annual reports cited by the spreadsheet.

In 2006, the number of canonical trials authorized doubled to 43, and eight appeals cases were heard. And for the first time, the Congregation revealed publicly the number of cases reported to it: 362, though that figure includes a handful of canonical crimes unrelated to sexual abuse.

A similar number of cases were reported in 2007 - 365 - but again the Congregation didn’t specify how many were abuse-related. Vatican officials, however, have said it received between 300-400 cases a year in the years after a 2002 explosion of U.S. sex abuse cases. In 2007, 23 cases were sent to dioceses for trial.

By 2008, the tone of the Vatican’s entry had changed. Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, traveled to the scandal-hit United States that year and is quoted in the annual report as telling reporters he was “mortified” by the scale of abuse and simply couldn’t comprehend “how priests could fail in such a way.”

That year’s entry also was notable for another reason: For the first time, an official Vatican document made clear that nothing in the church process precluded victims from reporting abuse to police.

There was another first in 2008, a critical year as abuse lawsuits in the U.S. naming the Holy See as a defendant were heating up: For the first time, the Vatican revealed the number of priests who had been defrocked: 68. Some 191 new cases were reported.

A year later, the number of defrocked priests rose to 103, while some 223 new cases were received, the vast majority of them abuse-related.

The year 2010 was another milestone in the sex-abuse saga, with thousands of cases reported in the media across Europe and beyond. Some 527 cases were reported to the Congregation. No figures were given that year for the number of defrocked priests. The Congregation instead described new church laws put in place to more easily and quickly remove them.

By 2011, with the new streamlined laws in place, the number of defrocked priests rose again: 260 priests were removed in one year, while 404 new cases of child abuse were reported. In addition to those defrocked, another 419 priests had lesser penalties imposed on them for abuse-related crimes.

In 2012, the last year for which statistics are available, the number of defrockings dropped to 124, with another 418 new cases reported.

Experts on sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church said the numbers are not surprising given how the scandal has unfolded in a global organization with more than 412,000 priests.

“Since the American eruption, you’ve had eruptions in Ireland and Australia and a number of other European countries,” said Nicholas Cafardi, the former dean of the Duquesne University School of Law, who wrote a book about the church’s response to sexual abuse. “The cases could be decades old. So it’s certainly a large number, but when you think of the time frame involved, it’s less impressive.” Information for this article was contributed by Laurie Goodstein of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 1 on 01/18/2014

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