Potiphar's Wife: The Vatican's Secret and Child Sexual Abuse

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heard about from Michael Parrot in The Rundown! of 7.7.2023, where it's argued the 1983 Code of Canon Law itself protects clerical child sex abuse. Cdl. Burke noted the 1917 Code had harsher punishments.

p. 10:

Damian [cf. The Book of Gomorrah, ref:8.27 ff., in which the "rejection thesis" is refuted] appealed to Pope Leo IX to take action against child sexual abuse by clergy. The pope's response [ibid. ref:9.1 ff.] was to dismiss only repeat offenders [i.e., to lift the perpetual excommunication], ignoring the effect on the victims and emphasising the need for forgiveness of the perpetrator.

WARNING: This book also links St. John Vianney to "clericalism"! This work must be taken with a grain of 🧂. The author is a retired civil attorney in Australia who is against Janet Smith, who supposedly taught Michael Voris. Tapsell is a Fishwrap columnist, too, so another reason to take this work with a graint of 🧂.

Tapsell was part of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse:

• Tapsell, Kieran. “Civil and Canon Law on Reporting Child Sexual Abuse to the Civil Authorities.” Journal for the Academic Study of Religion 31, no. 3 (April 26, 2019): 143–64.

p. 149: "The Catholic Church has always insisted on tradition as being one of its guides to future action (Catholic Catechism 1993: 75–83). It is therefore strange that in the early part of the twentieth century, the Church overturned some 15 centuries of tradition in dealing with child sexual abuse through its canon law and through cooperating with the civil authorities in seeing it punished."

p. 160: "The Catholic Church’s canon law for some 1,500 years until 1917 was that clergy sexual abuse of children was a crime that needed to be punished at least with imprisonment. In 1917 the Church turned that policy on its head by rejecting the involvement of the civil authorities, and then in 1922 by imposing the strictest secrecy over such allegations."

The cover-up of child sexual abuse by the Catholic Church has been occurring under the pontificate of six popes since 1922. For 1500 years, the Catholic Church accepted that clergy who sexually abused children deserved to be stripped of their status as priests and then imprisoned. A series of papal and Council decrees from the twelfth century required such priests to be dismissed from the priesthood, and then handed over to the civil authorities for further punishment.

That all changed in 1922 when Pope Pius XI issued his decree Crimen Sollicitationis that created a de facto privilege of clergy by imposing the secret of the Holy Office on all information obtained through the Church's canonical investigations. If the State did not know about these crimes, then there would be no State trials, and the matter could be treated as a purely canonical crime to be dealt with in secret in the Church courts. Pope Pius XII continued the decree. Pope John XXIII reissued it in 1962. Pope Paul VI in 1974 extended the reach of pontifical secrecy to the allegation itself. Pope John Paul II confirmed the application of pontifical secrecy in 2001, and in 2010, Benedict XVI even extended it to allegations about priests sexually abusing intellectually disabled adults. In 2010, Pope Benedict gave a dispensation to pontifical secrecy to allow reporting to the police where the local civil law required it, that is, just enough to keep bishops out of jail. Most countries in the world do not have any such reporting laws for the vast majority of complaints about the sexual abuse of children. Pontifical secrecy, the cornerstone of the cover up continues. The effect on the lives of children by the imposition of the Church's Top Secret classification on clergy sex abuse allegations may not have been so bad if canon law had a decent disciplinary system to dismiss these priests. The 1983 Code of Canon Law imposed a five year limitation period which virtually ensured there would be no canonical trials. It required bishops to try to reform these priests before putting them on trial. When they were on trial, the priest could plead the Vatican Catch 22 defence—he should not be dismissed because he couldn't control himself. The Church claims that all of this has changed. Very little has changed. It has fiddled around the edges of pontifical secrecy and the disciplinary canons. The Church has been moonwalking.