Long-standing debate about abuse in the Catholic Church
Published: Tuesday, Mar 5th 2024, 14:10
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The study published in September 2023 by the University of Zurich on cases of abuse in the Catholic Church in Switzerland has reignited a debate that has been going on for more than 25 years. A look at the archives of the Keystone-SDA news agency reveals this.
The debate began in North America and Ireland in the mid-1980s. In Switzerland, it first flared up at the end of the 1990s. As in other European countries, cases of sexual assault by church members increasingly came to light.
Several Catholic priests have been convicted, such as a former priest from Lumino and Castione in Ticino in 1998 and a priest from Chiasso in 1999. In 2001, a paedophile priest in the canton of Jura was sentenced to three months in prison. At the end of March 2002, the Catholic priest of Walenstadt SG was accused of sexual acts with children. He was arrested, confessed and resigned from his post.
In the same year, the Swiss Bishops' Conference (SBK) announced that a task force would address the problem. The Bishops' Conference also issued guidelines against sexual assault in pastoral care for the first time - including a duty for bishops to be heard when victims come forward. The "Sexual Assault in Pastoral Care" committee was also founded, which recorded reports of victims and perpetrators within the church in the following years.
"Leave the church in the village"
At the time, however, the SBK wanted to "leave the church in the village". A spokesperson said: "The cases of priests convicted of sexual abuse in Switzerland can be counted on one hand, and there are proportionally more paedophile family fathers." In 2002, the diocese of St. Gallen was also the first in Switzerland to set up an expert committee against sexual abuse.
In January 2008, a member of the Catholic hierarchy admitted responsibility for the first time in the case of a Swiss priest suspected of pedophilia. The diocese of Lausanne, Geneva and Fribourg had known since 1989 that a Capuchin had abused at least one child, said the official in an interview with the newspaper "Le Matin dimanche" at the time. However, the civil courts had never been informed. Instead, the suspect and partial confessor had been relocated to France.
In 2010, the then Einsiedeln Abbot Martin Werlen called for the creation of a central register in Rome in the wake of new cases of abuse in Switzerland that had become public, where accused clergymen could be recorded. The SBC refused, and a "blacklist" of abusive clergy in Switzerland was also not created despite demands from the population and individual church people.
Guidelines revised several times
However, the SBC tightened its guidelines against sexual assault in pastoral care. The bishops undertook to only employ pastoral workers if they had received information from the previous employer about the past life of the person concerned. In the same year, 146 cases of abuse were reported to the "Sexual Assault in Pastoral Care" committee. According to the SBK, new victims and perpetrators of sexual assaults in the double-digit range were reported in the following years.
In 2014, the SBK brought the third edition of the guidelines against sexual abuse into force. The guidelines now applied not only to those working directly in pastoral care, but also to all those working in various areas in the church environment, it was said at the time.
Between 2010 and 2015, around 20 criminal proceedings were opened against priests and Catholic monks for sexual abuse, the SBK announced at the request of the SDA news agency at the time. This was despite the fact that the church had recorded 172 suspected perpetrators. Some of the suspects had already died and others were "untraceable".
By the end of 2018, 317 cases of abuse had been registered in Switzerland. The victims were mostly children and young people. The SBK further tightened the duty to report: in future, sexual assaults in the Catholic Church should always lead to a report to the judiciary if there are indications of an official offense.
In April 2022, the Catholic Church commissioned a team of researchers from the University of Zurich to investigate the "dark chapter" of Swiss church history following the opening of the bishops' secret archives. The results of the study, published in fall 2023, revealed more than a thousand cases of abuse since the 1950s.
©Keystone/SDA
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