Pope Francis on Thursday passed a measure to oblige those who know about sex abuse in the Catholic Church to report it to their superiors, following a global clerical paedophilia scandal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Every diocese in the \nworld will now be obliged to have a system for the reporting of abuse, \nunder a new law published by the Vatican but the requirement will not \napply to secrets revealed to priests in the confessional.It is time to \nlearn from the \u201cbitter lessons of the past\u201d, Francis said in the text of\n the legal decree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The \u201cMotu Proprio\u201d, a legal document issued \nunder the pope\u2019s personal authority, declares that anyone who has \nknowledge of abuse, or suspects it, is \u201cobliged to report promptly\u201d to \nthe Church, using \u201ceasily accessible systems\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThough this \nobligation was formerly left up to individual consciences, it now \nbecomes a universally established legal precept\u201d within the Church, said\n Andrea Tornielli, editorial director of the Vatican\u2019s communications \ndepartment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Under the new measure, every diocese around the world\n is obliged by June 2020 to create a system for the reporting of sexual \nabuse by clerics, the use of child pornography and cover-ups of \nabuse.The document focuses particularly on the sexual or psychological \nabuse of children and vulnerable adults, but also targets sexual abuse \nand violence resulting from an abuse of authority such as the \nexploitation of nuns by priests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Victims\u2019 groups have long called\n for Francis to put in place concrete measures to tackle clerical child \nabuse, including immediately firing any cleric found guilty of even a \nsingle act of abuse, or of covering it up.They also want all abusers or \nsuspected abusers to be reported to police, and any abuse-related files \nhanded over to them.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Pope Francis on Thursday passed a measure to oblige those who know about sex abuse in the Catholic Church to report it to their superiors, following a global clerical paedophilia scandal. Every diocese in the world will now be obliged to have a system for the reporting of abuse, under a new law published by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":60978,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60977"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60979,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60977\/revisions\/60979"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/60978"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}