Pope Benedict Reportedly Defrocked 400 Priests in 2 Years
Pope Benedict XVI waves as he arrives to lead the general audience in Saint Peter's square, at the Vatican, Oct. 24, 2012.
Giampiero Sposito/Reuters
In his last two years as pope, Benedict XVI defrocked nearly 400 priests
for raping and molesting children, more than twice as many as the two
years that preceded a 2010 explosion of sex abuse cases in Europe and
beyond, according to a document obtained Friday by The Associated Press
and an analysis of Vatican statistics.
The data — 260 priests defrocked in 2011 and 124 in 2012, a total of 384
— represented a dramatic increase over the 171 priests defrocked in
2008 and 2009.
It was the first compilation of the number of priests forcibly removed
for sex abuse by the Vatican's in-house procedures — and a canon lawyer
said the real figure is likely far higher, since the numbers don't
include sentences meted out by diocesan courts.
The spike started a year after the Vatican decided to double the statute
of limitations on the crime, enabling victims who were in their late
30s to report abuse committed against them when they were children.
The Vatican has actually made some data public year by year in its
annual reports. But an internal Vatican document prepared to help the
Holy See defend itself before a U.N. committee this week in Geneva
compiled the statistics over the course of several years. Analysis of
the raw data cited in that document, which was obtained by the AP,
confirmed the figures.
Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican's U.N. ambassador in Geneva,
referred to just one of the statistics in the course of eight hours of
often pointed criticism and questioning Thursday from the U.N. human
rights committee. He said 418 new child sex abuse cases were reported to
the Vatican in 2012.
The Vatican initially said the AP report seemed to be a
misinterpretation of the 418 figure. However, the Vatican spokesman, the
Rev. Federico Lombardi, later issued a correction based on confirmation
of the AP calculations by the Vatican's former sex crimes prosecutor,
Monsignor Charles Scicluna.
The Vatican's annual report contains a wealth of information about the
activities of its various offices, including the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, which handles sex abuse cases. Although public,
the reports are not readily available or sold outside Rome and are
usually found in Vatican offices or Catholic university libraries.
An AP review of a decade's worth of the reference books shows a
remarkable evolution in the Holy See's in-house procedures to discipline
pedophiles since 2001, when the Vatican ordered bishops to send cases
of all credibly accused priests to Rome for review.
Before becoming pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger took action after
determining that bishops around the world weren't following church
policy and putting accused clerics on trial in church tribunals.
Instead, bishops routinely moved problem priests from parish to parish
rather than subject them to canonical trials — or turn them over to
police.
For centuries, the church has had its own in-house procedures to deal
with priests who sexually abuse children. One of the chief accusations
against the Vatican from victims is that bishops put the church's
procedures ahead of civil law enforcement by suggesting that victims
keep accusations quiet while they were dealt with internally.
The maximum penalty for a priest convicted by a church tribunal is
essentially losing his job: being defrocked, or removed from the
clerical state. There are no jail terms and nothing to prevent an
offender from raping again.
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