The majority of bishops’ conferences in the Americas, Europe and Asia have complied with a Vatican mandate to draw up anti-abuse guidelines, said the Vatican’s top investigator of clerical sex abuse. Without counting Africa, “more than half of the conferences responded” by the May deadline, Msgr. Charles Scicluna of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said in an interview with the Italian monthly Catholic magazine Jesus. All those who did not send in their proposed guidelines would be getting “a letter of reminder,” he added. The Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, quoted from the interview July 10 and said that the congregation received an encouraging number of responses from Anglo-Saxon countries, “but also Europe, Asia and Latin America have high percentages of responses.” While the result is gratifying, Msgr. Scicluna said in the interview, Africa “has a particular situation with great difficulty in church structures,” presumably referring to the lack of needed communications and other infrastructure that help a nation’s bishops draw up national policies. Evaluating each country’s proposed policies and guidelines for dealing with cases of clerical sexual abuse of minors will take “at least a year,” and that process will not begin until after the summer, he said.
VATICAN CITY (CNS)