The clerical sexual abuse scandals have created “a button with which anyone can ostracize anyone else, leaving it to history to sort out justified accusations from the unjustified, and to God to compensate the innocent and punish the guilty.” For that reason, Melloni suggests, the next conclave “will have to protect the elected person from the risk of being delegitimized by an accusation designed to divide cardinals who challenge the election of an unworthy person from those who instead consider the election valid, at least for the presumption of innocence.” Lengthening the conclave, he argues, “would guarantee time for conversation and discussion within the college, which is more necessary than ever to reach a more shared electoral process and to allow candidates time to withdraw, in the well-founded expectation that someone could use true or even plausible information against them.”
Psychiatrists and psychologists pointed out that the emotional immaturity of certain priests was a more serious problem than we thought. Clericalism was then overwhelmingly designated as the heart of the problem, but the root of the problem was perhaps to be found elsewhere. Emotionally immature priests “are incapable of dealing with the fundamental ambivalence of the links they maintain with their faithful". Immaturity in adults can sometimes be difficult to detect, to the extent that some immature people can appear perfectly adult and even brilliant in their way of thinking, writing or, in the case of priests, their preaching. In 2024, the blind spot about the emotional and sexual immaturity of certain priests necessarily continues to give rise to serious instances of abuse.
"We can't ever reject somebody, where we take the worst thing they've done and say they aren't part of the human family anymore," Cardinal Cupich said. "And we can't ignore the pain and suffering of those who have been injured. They're family too." A former prosecutor said, "The focus is almost exclusively on punishment and controlling people who are incarcerated. There is very little attention given to caring for the person. We don't have a healing system." He now believes the system needs to be transformed, especially in how it treats people who are often suffering from trauma, generational poverty and/or mental illness.
During our conversation the following point jumped out at me, and continues to remain with me, the bisholp said, “Most Catholics are more influenced by the culture than the Gospel.” I then asked him, “Would you say that about your brother bishops as well?” Without hesitation, he replied, “Absolutely!” Pope Francis has often called this sad reality the “culture of indifference” where solid commitment to nonviolently protecting and enhancing the life and dignity of all human beings – especially the vulnerable and poor – is of little concern. He recently said that in societies often polluted by a culture of indifference and of waste, “as believers, we are called to go against the tide with a culture of tenderness, that is, of caring for others as God has cared for us: for me, for you, for each one of us.”
"Previous generations of priests, my generation, no one talked about it. You just didn’t talk about sexuality,” said Fichter, who was ordained in 2000. Plante, who has conducted psychological screenings for about 1,000 seminary candidates over the last three decades, agreed that the Catholic Church has been more mindful of the “whole humanity” of candidates in recent years. “In the old days, if there were any issues about sexuality or sexual expression, they were told to take a cold shower and pray about it,” said Plante. “Our culture and understanding of human behavior has evolved quite a bit over the past number of decades, not only as it relates to seminarians in the church, but just in general.”
Exercising his right under Church law, Father appealed the decision of the Dicastery of the Clergy, taking his case before the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura in Rome, which acts as the Church’s highest court. The Apostolic Signatura overturned the decision of the Dicastery of the Clergy, and thus overturned the decision of the Bishop removing Father as Pastor. The Apostolic Signatura reasoned that a credible accusation of sexual abuse of a minor was not a sufficient cause, by itself, to remove a priest from the office of pastor. The Bishop erred in removing Father from the office of Pastor due to the credible accusation without an intervening procedural process to further determine the truth of the accusation. The result of the Apostolic Signatura’s decision is that Father is and remains the canonical (lawful) Pastor.
The motivation of various “abuse reporting” bills is laudatory. All people of good will want to ensure the safety of children and protect them from abuse, but there is no evidence that forcing priests to disclose cases of abuse learned from the confessional would have prevented a single case of child abuse. On the other hand, bills requiring priests to reveal what is said to them in a purely religious act of Confession will do little more than deny people the free exercise of their religion, subsequently denying victims a crucial opportunity to receive help and healing.