Pope requires sex abuse claims in Vatican City be reported

Pope Francis has issued sweeping new sex abuse legislation for the Vatican City State and Vatican diplomats that requires the immediate reporting of allegations to Vatican prosecutors, as he seeks to create a model policy for the Catholic Church.

The mandatory reporting provision, while limited in scope to Vatican officials, marks the first time the Holy See has put into law requirements for Catholic officials to report allegations of sex crimes to police or face fines and possible jail time.

Francis also issued child protection guidelines for Vatican City State and its youth seminary, acting after the global sex abuse scandal exploded anew last year and The Associated Press reported that the headquarters of the Catholic Church had no policy to protect children from predator priests.

While the new norms only cover Vatican City State, affiliated institutions and the Holy See’s diplomatic corps, they were still symbolically significant and were welcomed by a former seminarian whose case helped spark the reform.

“I see this as something positive,” Kamil Jarzembowski told the AP.

The law for the first time provides a Vatican definition for “vulnerable people” who are entitled to the same protections as minors under church law. The Vatican amended its canon law covering sex abuse to include “vulnerable adults” in 2010, but never defined it.

According to the new Vatican definition, a vulnerable person is anyone who is sick or suffering from a physical or psychiatric deficiency, isn’t able to exercise personal freedom and has a limited capacity to understand or resist the crime.

The issue of whether “vulnerable people” can include seminarians, religious sisters or other adults who are emotionally dependent on clergy has come to the fore in the wake of the scandal over former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, a once high-ranking American cleric who molested seminarians, and revelations of priests and bishops around the world sexually preying on nuns.

The new law covers all personnel who live in or work for the Vatican and any abuse that occurs in the Vatican, the 44-hectare city state in the center of Rome and its other territories, as well as the Holy See’s vast diplomatic corps.

The Vatican’s own ambassadors have figured in some of the most scandalous cases of sex abuse in recent years, with papal representatives accused of groping, distributing child pornography and sexually abusing minors in their far-flung posts.

The provisions to punish them criminally are now contained in the city state’s criminal code, and are separate from the canon law that also imposes canonical penalties, such as defrocking, for predator priests worldwide.