The Copenhagen Post online

Friday, 19 March 2010 11:13 KR News   .

Bishop Czeslaw Kozon says that ethics council will investigate cases of abuse but there is no immediate legal obligation for him to report to police

In a week when several European bishops and cardinals have been forced to apologise for their failure to act on sexual abuse information, the Danish Catholic bishop has said the Church has no responsibility to investigate prior abuse cases, nor report current ones to police.

Bishop Czeslaw Kozon is the highest ranking Catholic official in Denmark. In a written response to a reporter, he said that in cases of sexual abuse, he has been advised by a lawyer that he is not obliged to immediately notify the authorities.

However, he was clear to point out that any cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Denmark are first handled by a specialist ethical committee comprising of a priest, lawyer and social worker.

‘Therefore my conduct in those kinds of cases would be dependant on what the ethical committee recommends. Before you’re presented with that kind of case, it’s impossible to say how you’d react and what measures must be taken,’ he said.

The bishop also said that the Church has developed an information folder detailing how all employees and member should behave if they suspect abuse. Those folders have been distributed to all Catholic churches.

But according to Kristeligt Dagblad newspaper, Kozon has previously admitted to being aware of four or five instances of abuse in the Danish Catholic Church dating back to the 1980s and earlier. None of the cases were reported to the authorities.

The bishop told the paper that his knowledge of the cases was ‘very fragmentary’ and no one had reported a concrete complaint or asked to have the cases investigated.

Yet despite the bishop’s statement coming on the back of legal advice, it has been widely criticised by legal and theological experts.

Kristen Ketscher, professor at the University of Copenhagen’s legal faculty, said a large organisation like the Catholic Church has a legal responsibility to ensure that cases of sexual assault are investigated and stopped.

‘You don’t do that by saying that you’ll neither investigate previous attacks nor report new attacks to the police,’ Ketscher told Kristeligt Dagblad.

According to Peter Lodberg, associate professor of theology at Aarhus University, there are likely to be serious consequences for the Church if alleged earlier abuse cases are not investigated.

‘If the Catholic Church does nothing, the cases will take on a snowball effect, getting bigger and bigger and destroying the Church’s backing and trustworthiness in Denmark,’ said Lodberg.

‘These cases are so serious in nature that someone has to get to the bottom of them.’

The Pilot (Archdiocese of Boston)

News briefs from Catholic News Service

18 March 2010

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- A priest who confesses sexual abuse in the sacrament of penance should be absolved and should generally not be encouraged by the confessor to disclose his acts publicly or to his superiors, a Vatican official said. Likewise, the confessor should not make the contents of such a confession public, said Bishop Gianfranco Girotti, regent of the Apostolic Penitentiary, a Vatican court that handles issues related to the sacrament of penance. Bishop Girotti spoke in an interview published March 17 in L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. His comments came as church leaders were responding to the disclosure of hundreds of allegations of past sexual abuse by priests in several European countries. Bishop Girotti spoke strictly about the response of a confessor, and not about the wider responsibility to acknowledge and investigate priestly sexual abuse outside the confessional. When a priest confesses such acts, "the confession can only have absolution as a consequence," he said. "It is not up to the confessor to make them public or to ask the penitent to incriminate himself in front of superiors. This is true because, on one hand, the sacramental seal remains inviolable and, on the other hand, one cannot provoke mistrust in the penitent," he said. "From the confessor, (the penitent) can only expect absolution, certainly not a sentence nor the order to confess his crime in public," he said. Other Vatican officials, who spoke on background, said a distinction should be drawn between what a confessor requires of a penitent as a condition for absolution, and what the confessor may strongly encourage the penitent to do.