An editorial last week in The New York Times called upon Pope Benedict XVI to make the American bishops’ “zero tolerance” approach to sexual abuse binding on the worldwide Catholic church. In principle that’s a perfectly reasonable idea, especially since Vatican spokespersons routinely invoke the pope’s defense of the tough American rules as proof that he gets it.
Yet the editorial also used the word “shocking” to describe the fact that eight years after the American policies were developed, the pontiff has not yet imposed them on the rest of the world.
That’s where people who know the lay of the land in the church will probably balk, writes John Allen.
Aside from the fact that Rome has an evolutionary sense of time (in which eight years seems a nanosecond), there are three other reasons why this is hardly a shocker.
Unpacking those reasons may shed light not only on the sexual abuse crisis, but also the complexities of setting policy in a global church.
First, it’s a well-known fact of Catholic life that the “one strike and you’re out” rule at the heart of the American norms - automatic removal from ministry for life for even one act of sexual abuse against a minor - plays to mixed reviews, at best, around the global church.
That’s not because the rest of the Catholic world is necessarily soft on abuse, but because some bishops and canon lawyers regard the “one strike” policy as a distortion of the church’s legal tradition.
Over the centuries, they argue, canon law has resisted “one size fits all” penalties, preferring to leave discretion in the hands of judges to make the punishment fit the crime.
SIC: CathNews