Abusive clergy must feel full force of law

When Pope Francis convened the unprecedented Vatican summit to tackle clerical child sex abuse and institutional cover-ups, the bishops already knew of a bombshell about to hit the Catholic Church. A ban on reporting for legal reasons on the trial in Australia of Cardinal George Pell, formerly one of the pope’s inner circle of nine trusted cardinals, did not prevent them learning from overseas reports that a jury had unanimously found him guilty of rape and molestation of two 13-year-old choirboys in a Melbourne cathedral 22 years ago. But even foreknowledge of a verdict revealed only this week did not spur them to answer the pope’s call for “concrete measures” to deal with abusive priests and their protectors. Instead there was talk of a cultural shift and change of heart in tackling the evil at local leadership level.

The reluctance to agree on a global edict from Rome against criminal betrayal of trust may be put down to the fact that so far the scandal has mostly surfaced in the United States and Europe as well as Australia. The faith of Catholics in Asia, Africa and Latin America, growth areas for the church, has not been so openly tested by it.

Pell, 77, the most senior Catholic figure ever to be charged with sex offences, faces jail, though he is to appeal. It must have come as a shock to the faithful to hear from victims what the pope rightly called atrocities, and his likening of their abusers to “ravenous wolves” and “tools of Satan”. This is a crisis for the church which has its origins in misguided concern for the institution rather than empathy with the victims, despite evidence of depression, drug addiction and suicide. Pell is identified with a legal strategy to offer them derisory sums of compensation in return for undertakings not to pursue claims against the church.

Expecting cultural change to be driven from the heart at local level risks confusing crime with moral sin for which there need be no civil accounting. The Vatican did announce specific limited steps developed before the summit, such as raising the definition of a minor from age 14 “to expand protection”. But the pope remains right in the first place to call for action through church law. Priests who have abused children should be cast out and handed over to the civil law and bishops responsible for cover-ups defrocked.