Catholic bishops discuss revised guidelines for dealing with abuse cases for the first time today in Wurzburg. "We have improved the content of the guidelines and formulated them more clearly, more precisely," said the Bishops' Conference's abuse commissioner, Bishop Stephan Ackermann, on the draft over the weekend.
Ackermann, together with a group of experts, had prepared a draft that was sent to the bishops at the end of last week. The Bishops' Conference had announced several times that it wanted to revise its 2002 guidelines by the summer. In Wurzburg, the Permanent Council of the Bishops' Conference meets. The 27 local bishops belong to the committee, but unlike the plenary assembly, the auxiliary bishops do not. No dedicated legal counsel Ackermann said the draft regulates, among other things, in more detail the relationship of the Catholic Church and its institutions to state law enforcement agencies. "It must be unequivocally clear that we do not claim any legal space detached from state law," the abuse commissioner said. The revised guidelines should also focus more on the victim's perspective and explicitly address prevention work. According to Ackermann, the question of selection and qualification of abuse commissioners in the dioceses will also be addressed. The bishop had already reiterated several times in interviews that the church must tighten guidelines for dealing with abuse cases: "If there is a case of abuse, a forensic report must be made on the perpetrator, regardless of whether the case is time-barred or not."This definitely belongs in the guidelines of the bishops' conference," they said. Ackermann expressed optimism that the bishops' conference would be able to adopt its revised guidelines at the next meeting of the Permanent Council in June. Automatic obligation to report? In recent weeks, there has been repeated discussion about an automatic obligation to report cases of abuse within the church. The Bavarian bishops had agreed on such an obligation to advertise. In mid-April, the Vatican had for the first time explicitly emphasized the competence of law enforcement authorities in cases of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Ackermann pointed out at the time, however, that the Vatican document did not prescribe an automatic duty to report. "The document simply states that state law must be respected with regard to reporting crimes to the competent authorities," the Trier bishop explained. In Germany, there is no obligation to report abuse cases. Victims' organizations had also warned against such an automatism, because the protection and needs of the victims must have priority.