Can the Church handle a spiritual abuse law?

Will new rules at the DDF actually do anything?

The Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith has commissioned a study group to consider how “spiritual abuse” could be classified as a distinct and particular crime under canon law.

While spiritual abuse and the deployment of “false mysticism” is already recognized by the Church as a potential aggravating factor in other penal matters, it is not specifically listed as a crime which can be prosecuted in its own right in the Code of Canon Law.

Evidence from many cases suggests that a period of spiritual abuse can precede other forms of abuse, but often it can be seen as subjective or inconclusive when reported.

So could a delict of “spiritual abuse” actually make it into law — and if it does, how easy would it be to prosecute?

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In a Nov. 22 audience with Pope Francis, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández presented a proposal on “false mysticism and spiritual abuse.”

The concept is already recognized by the dicastery “within a very specific context,” the cardinal wrote in a preparatory document.

“Namely, issues related to spirituality and alleged supernatural phenomena, which now are handled by the Doctrinal Section. This includes ‘problems and behavior connected with the discipline of the faith, such as cases of pseudo-mysticism, alleged apparitions, visions, and messages attributed to supernatural origin…’”

“In this context, ‘false mysticism’ refers to spiritual approaches that harm the harmony of the Catholic understanding of God and our relationship with the Lord. It is in this sense that the phrase appears in the Magisterium,” Fernández wrote to the pope.

But the cardinal flagged an issue he believed should be addressed: “There is no delict in canon law classified by the name ‘false mysticism,’ even though canonists occasionally use the expression in a manner that is closely tied to crimes of abuse.”

Fernandez noted that in new norms for the assessment of alleged supernatural occurrences and phenomena issued by the DDF earlier this year, the dicastery did recognize that “the use of purported supernatural experiences or recognized mystical elements as a means of or a pretext for exerting control over people or carrying out abuses is to be considered of particular moral gravity.”

Given the dicastery’s recognition of the role spiritual abuse can play in other forms of abuse, and given the dicastery’s increasingly detailed definition of the phenomenon, the situation described can now “be evaluated as an aggravating circumstance if it occurs together with delicts,” the cardinal said.

“At the same time, it is possible to classify a delict of ‘spiritual abuse,’ avoiding the overly broad and ambiguous expression of ‘false mysticism.’”

With this in mind, the cardinal proposed — and it was accepted — that a special working group be set up, composed of members of the DDF and the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, led by the prefect of that dicastery, Archbishop Filippo Iannone, to draft specific proposals for the codification of the crime of spiritual abuse within canon law.

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For some canonists and Vatican observers, the move could be seen as opportune — if not overdue.

A number of abuse cases investigated by the Church, by The Pillar, and by other outlets in recent years share some commonalities: A person with great charisma, thought to be spiritually gifted, who gradually convinces subordinates or directees — or even families — that they can only trust him, and not themselves, or others.

From there, the control can take many forms. In some cases, it doesn’t go beyond emotional and psychological control — though the effort to deprogram a person who experiences such things can take years, and often not wholly be accomplished. In other cases, physical abuse becomes common.

And in many such cases, sexual abuse also becomes prominent.

Perhaps the most high-profile case in recent years is that of Fr. Marko Rupnik, the former Jesuit and internationally-recognized religious artist, accused of abusing dozens of religious sisters over decades within the context of a pseudo-spiritual relationship for the creation of his art.

Rupnik has been accused of sexually abusing some 30 religious sisters. Some of the allegations involve claims of sexual abuse which reportedly occurred directly in the context of designing and creating his works of art.

“On [one] occasion he kissed me lightly on the mouth, telling me that this was how he kissed the altar where he celebrated the Eucharist,” one victim recounted, saying that the priest “at first slowly and gently infiltrated my psychological and spiritual world by appealing to my uncertainties and frailties while using my relationship with God to push me to have sexual experiences with him.”

In October last year, Pope Francis announced that he had waived the canonical statute of limitations on allegations against the priest, and instructed the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith — the Church’s highest disciplinary court — to initiate a new process against the cleric.

The Vatican later ordered the closure of a religious community co-founded by the mosaic artist.

Rupnik is only one of several cases in which religious sisters allege that spiritual abuse was both a precursor to physical abuse and was not taken sufficiently seriously by superiors.

Several religious sisters told The Pillar earlier this year that Fr. David Nicgorski, formerly the superior general of the Oblates of the Virgin Mary, groomed them in spiritual direction while they were members of the Daughters of St. Paul, leading in one case to an alleged sexual assault.

“Father Dave made himself almost irreplaceable in my spiritual life,” one of the sisters recalled. “He was always pushing the boundaries, but he would do things in front of everyone. That was another thing that made me question myself — everyone was seeing this happen.”

More recently, the Vatican has faced questions over the case of Argentine priest Ariel Alberto Príncipi, who was laicized for the abuse of minors and whom the papal chief of staff Archbishop Edgar Peña Parra attempted to illegally restore to ministry in September of this year.

Principi was found guilty by two canonical tribunals of sexually abusing teenage boys under the guise of “healing prayers” in which he would grope their genitals under the pretext of “curing” them of homosexual urges.

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Canonists with any familiarity with abuse cases have long understood that the sexualization of spirituality is a common theme among such cases — that the kind of abuse cases which find their way to the DDF often if ot usually feature manipulation and spiritual grooming, which often entails pushing boundaries by encouraging a kind of intermingling of sexuality and spiritual experience.

So much so that Cardinal Fernández’s call to codify the abuse of spirituality is, as he suggested himself, more than apt. But recognizing an obvious need does not mean the path to drafting a clear, and clearly prosecutable crime of spiritual abuse will be short or easy.

While clear cases of abusive spirituality can be recognized, other instances of impropriety or problematic behavior might be harder to assess legally. For example, the cardinal himself has at times been criticized for writing about a kind of sexualized spirituality, which at least some would call to be included in a new canon on spiritual abuse.

Perhaps the best-known example of this would be his 1998 book “Mystical Passion,” which garnered much attention last year because it includes graphic descriptions of sex and sexual acts, along with a spiritualization of sexuality, and sexualization of spirituality.

The work depicts an account of an apparently erotic encounter with Jesus, which Fernández depicted as a story recounted to him by a 16-year-old girl, who apparently experienced it in prayer.

It also made an argument that a person can commit grave sexual sins, “without being guilty and without losing the grace of God” — an argument which tries to ground itself in the Church’s moral theology regarding subjective culpability and human agency, but which has been a focus for some criticism since the book emerged.

Of course, there is no evidence that Cardinal Fernández has ever acted inappropriately in his priesthood, and no reason to conclude that he did or would have.

But the criticism of the “Mystical Passion” text raises obvious questions about how he and his department would define, let alone police, red flags pertaining to sexualization of spirituality, and the difficulty in drawing a line between problematic behavior and actionably criminal spiritual abuse.

This is especially difficult because any law establishing a penalty needs to be interpreted strictly, which means that if the law is to be applied to existing cases at the DDF, or ones that come in, it would be need to be very concretely defined, or else it will be swatted away easily by competent advocates who say it doesn’t apply to their clients.

But the real problem that will face any new law criminalizing spiritual abuse won’t be as simple as crafting the right legal language or coming up with a usable definition. It likely won’t even be coming up with a usable (and acceptable to victims) standard of justice, or appropriate penalties.

The greatest challenge facing the DDF and the Dicastery for Legislative Texts will come only after any new law is on the books: convincing superiors to enforce it, and creating a culture within the Church which is both educated in what the law says, and sensitive to what that might look like in practice for those at risk of abuse.

Further, the dicastery itself will have to be resourced enough to take on another angle of examination and adjudication both for the cases it has already, and the cases which might come in. And it could reasonably expect to see a glut of complaints about spiritual abuse sent to it for adjudication, as that might be seen to take the stickiest, knottiest, and least pleasant diocesan conflicts around the world from the diocesan bishop’s desk, to an at the DDF.

Here, the diocesan bishop might say about problems he’s not quite sure how to solve, this might be spiritual abuse. The DDF would need to at least have the manpower to read through more files, and to eventually develop a system for triaging them.

In a Vatican already facing a serious cash crunch, personnel crunch, time crunch, and morale crunch, taking on a new, big, vast, mostly undefined project with a likelihood of sprawl seems like a big lift. And if there aren’t personnel to deal with it, a new law on spiritual abuse will be as good as dead on arrival.

If the years since the McCarrick scandal and the promulgation of laws like Come una madre amorevole and Voes estis lux mundi have one clear lesson, it is that it is far easier to change a law on paper than it is to make that law a reality in the Church’s life.