The Vatican seems more concerned about ordaining women as it does about child rape. Bishops still aren't required to report sex crimes to the authorities:
The Vatican issued a new set of norms Thursday to respond to the worldwide clerical abuse scandal, cracking down on priests who rape and molest minors and the mentally disabled.The leaders of the Catholic Church just don't get it. They've been coddling, abetting and enabling child rapists for decades. Yet, they still don't seem to grasp that, in the real world, child rape is a crime and offenders should be in jail.
The norms extend from 10 to 20 years the statute of limitations on priestly abuse and also codify for the first time that possessing or distributing child pornography is a canonical crime.
But the document made no mention of the need for bishops to report abuse to police and doesn't include any ''one-strike and you're out'' policy as demanded by some victims' groups.
The document also listed the attempted ordination of a woman as a ''grave crime'' to be handled by the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, just as sex abuse is. Critics have complained that including both in the same document implied equating them.
And, the advocates for victims aren't impressed:
But Barbara Dorris of the Survivors' Network for Those Abused by Priests, a leading group representing victims of clerical sex abuse, said the new guidelines ''can be summed up in three words: missing the boat.But, the Vatican isn't going to stand for women becoming priests. Hell, no. They'll really fight that.
''They deal with one small procedure at the very tail end of the problem: defrocking pedophile priests,'' she said.
Belgium did the right thing, despite the Pope's whining. More police raids on Catholic Church offices are what's needed. Treat them like the criminals that they are.
