JPII’s abuse reforms, 25 years later
What 'Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela' means for the Church
Like it did 25 years ago, April 30 came and went this year without notice.
When April 30 went unnoticed in 2001, I was a newly ordained priest, sitting in a classroom in Rome, about to finish my license in canon law.
I happened to be taking a class on penal (criminal) law that semester. I had no idea how important April 30 was going to be; to be honest, I had no idea that my entire life, my entire priesthood, would be changed by that day.
It was on that day – April 30, 2001 – that Pope John Paul II promulgated an apostolic letter entitled Sacramentorum sanctitatis tutela, which updated the Church’s law regarding the sexual abuse of minors.
At the time, the apostolic letter gained little attention. It would not be for several more months – Jan. 6, 2002, to be exact – that the “Spotlight” series in the Boston Globe began to unveil the extent of sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Boston, and the inactivity on the part of Church leaders.
This newspaper series would eventually lead to the USCCB’s “Dallas Charter,” and the flurry of activity by the U.S. bishops, aiming to respond to the endless stream of media reports of clerical sexual abuse which followed the initial Spotlight story about the abuses perpetrated by John Geoghan.
But while few people paid attention to SST – as the apostolic letter came to be known – even fewer people know that the most novel aspects of it were actually the fruit of earlier efforts by the U.S. bishops to address cases of clerical sexual abuse.
In 1994, the U.S. bishops sought and obtained permission from the Holy See to make two important changes to canon law.
The first change was raising the age of a minor from 16 to 18, as it pertained to cases of clerical sexual abuse. That was significant because it allowed the bishops to respond through canon law to accusations that would represent crimes in all 50 states, some of which considered minors to be under the age of 18.
The second was a technical change regarding the calculation of the statute of limitations. For cases involving minors, the clock wouldn’t start on prescription — the proper canonical term for the statute of limitations — until an alleged victim turned 18.
These important changes were introduced as universal law in SST, months before “Spotlight.”
SST was, and remains, the single most important piece of legislation in the life of the Church in the 21st century. That no one remembers or celebrates its birthday is unfortunate but understandable. It was released with no fanfare, and, in all honesty, it was completely inadequate for the challenges it would immediately face — as was the Church.
However, both it, and the Church, changed in response to the crisis that followed.
SST was a law written for another time. It demanded that only priests could serve in any tribunal function in cases of accused priests, as if the number of cases would be low enough or the number of adequately trained priest canonists high enough for that to be feasible.
It allowed cases to be adjudicated only by means of a judicial penal trial, a more complex set of procedural norms that almost no one in the Church had used with any regularity since the new Code of Canon Law was promulgated in 1983.
It even forgot to include within its competence one of the crimes that the office which crafted the law had, itself, created in the 1980s — the malicious recording and publication of a confession.
But SST adapted. Quickly.
With the onslaught of cases that arrived from the U.S. – then later Ireland, and Belgium, and Germany and Latin America and, well, everywhere – successive popes adapted the law to fit the need. It functioned in many ways like an emergency utility infielder – a law that capaciously took in many difficult issues and sought to provide an adequate response. This was in part possible because of the specific way canon law looks at crimes of sexual abuse. By speaking of this horrific crime in moral terms – as a violation of the sixth commandment – the law was able to include different forms of abuse, without the delay that would have been necessary to legislate about, for example, online abuse or child pornography.
For years, SST was the only universal canon law of its kind, and it necessarily came to impact the way the Church thought about and practiced penal law more broadly.
It also pointed to other areas of the law that needed addressing, as the cases of clerical sexual abuse exposed flaws in matters of episcopal responsibility and other forms of abuse that also needed to be addressed.
For priests of my generation — I was ordained in 2000 — our entire exercise of ministry has been in the shadow of the sexual abuse crisis. For some, it was already a part of their lives as they, too, had been victims of abuse. For me, it has become a shadow over nearly all of my ministry for the past 17 years: in my work in the discipline section of the (now) Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith for more than a decade, and now six years of service to dioceses across the U.S. since returning home.
But for all of us, priests and laity alike, SST was already working before the Dallas Charter to shape a future in the Church that would never again allow crimes of child sexual abuse to be unaddressed.
I celebrate April 30 every year, as the birthday of the law that changed the Church for the better. It is a law that changed my life. Whether you know it or not, it changed yours, too. It is, and will remain, the law which marked a definitive turning point in the life of the Church, if for no other reason than it reminds us all of our responsibility to the most vulnerable among us.
Fr. John Paul Kimes is an Associate Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame Law School and the Raymond of Peñafort Fellow in Canon Law at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
He served for 11 years as a canon lawyer at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He was ordained in 2000 as a priest of the Maronite Catholic Eparchy of Our Lady of Lebanon of Los Angeles