Vatican seminar questions "zero tolerance" on abuse

A seminar on clerical pedophilia, organized by the Vatican in April 2003, has raised serious questions about the "zero tolerance" policy adopted by the bishops of the United States.

The proceedings of the Vatican seminar were released on February 23 in book form, but made available only to the presidents of the world's episcopal conferences. While some Vatican officials said that the work would be made available to the public late in March 2004, others said that it would remain a private document, available only to bishops and to consulting professionals working with the bishops' approval.

However, the Vatican press office did furnish journalists with a short briefing on the contents of the study. This briefing occurred just days before the February 27 release of heavily anticipated report on the extent of clerical sex abuse in the United States. According to press accounts based on preliminary drafts of the American report, the final account will show that in the past 50 years, 4 percent of all American Catholic priests were accused of sexual abuse.

The proceedings of last year's seminar, produced in book form by Libreria Editrice Vaticana, is a 200-page volume, edited by Msgr. Charles Scicluna, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. In presenting the book to the press, Bishop Elio Sgreccia-- the president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, which organized the April seminar-- stressed that it includes a wide variety of approaches, including "scientific considerations, but also anthropological, ecclesiological, and pastoral."

Bishop Sgreccia summed up the most provocative conclusion of the seminar by saying that the specialists assembled by the Vatican had concluded that "it is possible and necessary to find an approach even for priests who are guilty of sexual abuse, to pursue treatment and rehabilitation, and not to abandon them or consider them useless to the Church."

The seminar, held April 2-5, 2003, brought together a dozen doctors and psychiatrists, of different religious backgrounds, from the United States, Canada, and Germany. The closed-door meeting was also attended by representatives of several Vatican dicasteries.

The seminar, which was announced as an effort to study the sex-abuse problem from "a strictly scientific and clinical point of view," came one year after the leading prelates of the United States were summoned to Rome for a special meeting to discuss the burgeoning American sex-abuse scandal.

The published proceedings of the seminar show that many participants looked askance at the approach adopted by the US bishops. Canadian research Karl Hanson argued for more flexible guidelines. American psychiatrist Martin Kafka spoke of the "excessively punitive" policies adopted by American hierarchy. And Canadian William Marshall, a specialist in the psychology of pedophile, argued that the strict policies ratified by the US bishops' conference at a 2002 meeting in Dallas failed to address the problems of the pedophile priests themselves.

This news story originally appeared on the Catholic World News site. http://www.cwnews.com.