The Pope was accused of covering up claims after the global church sex abuse scandal resurfaced in 2018.
The Pope has revised the church’s sexual abuse policies, expanding their scope to include lay Catholic leaders. And specifying that both children and adults can be victims.
In 2019, a landmark decree mandated that all priests and members of religious orders must disclose any suspicions of abuse. It also holds bishops directly responsible for any misconduct they commit or cover-up.
The provisions were initially introduced on a provisional basis, but the Vatican announced on Saturday that they would become permanent as of April 30 and include additional measures to strengthen the church’s fight against abuse.
Pope Francis has taken steps to hold the Vatican’s leaders accountable after a decade of abuse scandals.
In 2018, however, after the global church sex abuse scandal made headlines once more, he came under intense scrutiny. And was even accused of knowing about certain allegations and assisting to cover them up.
In a 2019 speech, he pledged to combat the “destructive evil” of child sex abuse within the Catholic church.
However, according to critics, the results have been uneven, and Francis has been accused of being reluctant to defrock abusive clergy.
Recent allegations of sexual misconduct
A month ago, the Jesuits of the Roman Catholic Church deemed allegations of sexual, psychological. And spiritual abuse against one of their most prominent members to be “highly credible.”
About 25 people, mostly former nuns, have accused Father Marko Ivan Rupnik, 69, a prominent religious artist, of various forms of abuse, either when he was the spiritual director of a community of nuns in his native Slovenia approximately 30 years ago, or after he moved to Rome to pursue his career as an artist.
Rupnik has not publicly addressed the allegations.
Whereas the original rules encompassed sexual acts committed against “minors and vulnerable persons,” the new version expands the definition of victims to include crimes committed “with a minor or with a person who habitually has an imperfect use of reason or with a vulnerable adult.”
The Vatican stated that Church members were obligated to report cases of violence against religious women by clergy. Also the harassment of adult seminarians or novices.
