Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY
/
Papal commission to submit first safeguarding report, launches study group
Papal commission to submit first safeguarding report, launches study group
Mar 16, 2025 9:20 PM

  The pope's commission for advancing the Catholic Church's efforts to prevent the abuse of vulnerable persons is due to submit its first annual report on the state of safeguarding in the church.

  In astatementdated March 8 and sent to reporters March 11, the commission said it had approved the submission of its "pilot annual report" on safeguarding policies and procedures to Pope Francis, who had requested a report from the group in April 2022.

  While focused particularly on safeguarding policies and procedures in the 13 countries whose bishops made their "ad limina" visits to Rome in 2023 and engaged with the commission staff as part of those visits, the report also offers an assessment of the trends at a regional level, pointing to areas for improvement and it offers recommendations.

  The commission's annual report will offer "recommendations on how to move forward in achieving the goals of truth, justice, reparation" and to prevent child sex abuse in the church. A section of the report will also review how various departments of the Roman Curia engage the local church in safeguarding, thestatementsaid.

  Cardinal Seán P. O'Malley of Boston, president of the commission, told participants at the assembly that the report was expected to be released this summer.

  The commission also announced in its March 8statementthe approval of a study group "to examine the reality of vulnerable persons in the context of the Church's ministry and how this informs safeguarding efforts."

  The goal of the study group is to "adopt a multi-disciplinary approach to the questions around vulnerability to provide concrete recommendations on how the Church might better combat the harms committed against non-minorsby the Church's ministers in a variety of pastoral settings," thestatementadded. It will present its findings in a report and offer a set of recommendations.

  While the Catholic law meant to prevent clerical sexual abuse has listed "vulnerable adults" as a special category in need ofprotection, questions have been raised about whether those persons should always be treated in church procedures in a way equivalent to children under the age of 18. For example, many asked, is a religious sister vulnerable to a priest who is her spiritual adviser in the same way that a person with a developmental disability would be.

  In early October, Patricia Espinosa Hernández, a member of the pontifical commission and a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, wrote to women who had said they were victims of Slovenian Father Marko Rupnik, a well-known artist. The commission, Espinosa told them, wanted to hear about how they had been treated during the various phases of the church's investigation of the former Jesuit priest.

  The commission'sstatementalso spoke of a "universal guidelines framework," which they planned to release "very soon," and which aims to "set a benchmark against which the Church can assess safeguarding capacity, measure weakness and set targets for improvement." thestatementsaid.

  The commission had launched an online survey in June 2023 open to anyone interested in giving feedback on the proposed framework's application to local churches.

  Pope Francis had met with the commission on the final day of their plenary assembly March 7 and said that despite discouragement the church's safeguarding efforts "must not wane."

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY
Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church
Religion & Liberty: Volume 33, Number 4 Spurgeon and the Poverty-Fighting Church by Christopher Parr • October 30, 2023 Portrait of Charles Spurgeon by Alexander Melville (1885) Charles Spurgeon was a young, zealous 15-year-old boy when he came to faith in Christ. A letter to his mother at the time captures the enthusiasm of his newfound Christian faith: “Oh, how I wish that I could do something for Christ.” God granted that wish, as Spurgeon would e “the prince of...
Creating an Economy of Inclusion
The poor have been the main subject of concern in the whole tradition of Catholic Social Teaching. The Catholic Church talks often about a “preferential option for the poor.” In recent years, many of the Church’s social teaching documents have been particularly focused on the needs of the poorest people in the world’s poorest countries. The first major analysis of this topic could be said to have been in the papal encyclical Populorum Progressio, published in 1967 by Pope...
Lord Jonathan Sacks: The West’s Rabbi
In October 1798, the president of the United States wrote to officers of the Massachusetts militia, acknowledging a limitation of federal rule. “We have no government,” John Adams wrote, “armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, and revenge or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net.” The nation that Adams had helped to found would require the parts of the body...
Jesus and Class Warfare
Plenty of Marxists have turned to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Memorable examples include the works of F.D. Maurice and Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian. After criticizing how so many translations of the New Testament soften Jesus’ teachings regarding material possessions, greed, and wealth, Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart has gone so far to ask, “Are Christians supposed to be Communists?” In the Huffington Post, Dan Arel has even claimed that “Jesus was clearly a Marxist,...
Up from the Liberal Founding
During the 20th century, scholars of the American founding generally believed that it was liberal. Specifically, they saw the founding as rooted in the political thought of 17th-century English philosopher John Locke. In addition, they saw Locke as a primarily secular thinker, one who sought to isolate the role of religion from political considerations except when necessary to prop up the various assumptions he made for natural rights. These included a divine creator responsible for a rational world for...
Mistaken About Poverty
Perhaps it is because America is the land of liberty and opportunity that debates about poverty are especially intense in the United States. Americans and would-be Americans have long been told that if they work hard enough and persevere they can achieve their dreams. For many people, the mere existence of poverty—absolute or relative—raises doubts about that promise and the American experiment more generally. Is it true that America suffers more poverty than any other advanced democracy in the...
Conversation Starters with … Anne Bradley
Anne Bradley is an Acton affiliate scholar, the vice president of academic affairs at The Fund for American Studies, and professor of economics at The Institute of World Politics. There’s much talk about mon good capitalism” these days, especially from the New Right. Is this long overdue, that a hyper-individualism be beaten back, or is it merely cover for increasing state control of the economy? Let me begin by saying that I hate “capitalism with adjectives” in general. This...
C.S. Lewis and the Apocalypse of Gender
From very nearly the beginning, Christianity has wrestled with the question of the body. Heretics from gnostics to docetists devalued physical reality and the body, while orthodox Christianity insisted that the physical world offers us true signs pointing to God. This quarrel persists today, and one form it takes is the general confusion among Christians and non-Christians alike about gender. Is gender an abstracted idea? Is it reducible to biological characteristics? Is it a set of behaviors determined by...
Adam Smith and the Poor
Adam Smith did not seem to think that riches were requisite to happiness: “the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for” (The Theory of Moral Sentiments). But he did not mend beggary. The beggar here is not any beggar, but Diogenes the Cynic, who asked of Alexander the Great only to step back so as not to cast a shadow upon Diogenes as he reclined alongside the highway....
How Dispensationalism Got Left Behind
Whether we like it or not, Americans, in one way or another, have all been indelibly shaped by dispensationalism. Such is the subtext of Daniel Hummel’s provocative telling of the rise and fall of dispensationalism in America. In a little less than 350 pages, Hummel traces how a relatively insignificant Irishman from the Plymouth Brethren, John Nelson Darby, prompted the proliferation of dispensational theology, especially its eschatology, or theology of the end times, among our ecclesiastical, cultural, and political...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved