Thaindian News

July 9, 2010 (Pen Men at Work): It has been mentioned by credible sources that the Vatican is geared up to modify, in the next week, the Church rules on sexual abuse of kids by priests, on punishments for perpetration of child pornography and on doubling an edict of restrictions. The Catholic Church, headed by Pope Benedict, has been battling to defend its honor, which has been walloped recently by a sequence of scandals associated with sexual abuse. Therefore, these modifications are in the offing in order to salvage the image of Catholicism. This dishonor of sexual abuse has besmirched Catholicism in the US, Ireland, Germany and some other European nations. Several influential representatives of Catholicism have been perpetrators of sexual mistreatment.

The modifications will, in point of fact, make the legal processes about sexual abuse cases, which are identified as special faculties, the international norms. These special faculties were hitherto permitted only under extraordinary conditions.

One Church bureaucrat familiarized with the fresh regulations has stated that the special faculties have been modified into law. They have been inscribed in stone.

The edict of restrictions for sexual abuse cases will be amplified to 20 years subsequent to the sufferer’s 18th birthday. Currently, it is 10 years. This signifies that the sufferers will be able to launch indictments until they reach 38 years.

This is noteworthy since countless persons, who were sexually maltreated by priests when they were kids, are not able to generate the bravery to put up their hands to report such abuses until they have crossed adulthood considerably. The sufferers are also unable to produce the moral strength to publicize the cases of their sexual maltreatment.

The modifications will also permit local bishops to defrock priests if the substantiation of sexual mistreatment is unambiguous and serious. The process of defrocking can proceed devoid of priestly inquiries, which can be annoyingly prolonged and expensive. The Church will be capable of defrocking priests in such instances by pronouncement.

The modifications will also spell out that the priests, who are the proprietors of child pornography in any medium, will be deemed to have perpetrated a grave sin. They will be put through penalizing deeds even if they are not perpetrators of sexual mistreatment.

These modifications to the Vatican’s Code of Canon Law were detailed over the past few months. They are likely to be revealed in the approaching days.

These fresh guiding principles are to be undersigned by the Cardinal William Levada. He was the successor of Pope Benedict XVI as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Levada had obtained authorization on this issue from the pontiff.

These are, fundamentally, modifications of the ‘Motu Proprio’. Now, this is a text with reference to the solutions for severe cases of abuse. The text was discharged by the Vatican in 2001.