Church delays independent investigation into abuse scandals

Catholic organisations and some priests say the Church should commission a comprehensive independent investigation following its paedophilia scandal, LRT reported. Archbishop Gintaras Grušas, however, says the time for such an audit has not yet come and that the past can be examined later.

Some clergy members agree, saying it is first necessary to assess whether an investigation would produce tangible results capable of changing the situation today. An expert said such statements create the impression that the Church is seeking results favourable to itself or is reluctant to investigate what it does not want to know.

Mykolas Sotničenka, the coordinator for the protection of minors and vulnerable adults in the Vilnius Archdiocese, told the LRT radio programme LRT RADIJO ringas that the Church must first ensure a smooth and independent audit process that would produce concrete results.

It would not be enough to call for an independent investigation during a crisis, he said. The Church would also need to decide who could conduct the audit, what methodology would be used, to whom the investigators would report, who could open the archives and whether all files and archives could be made available while protecting the data of third parties and people who had been wrongly accused.

Sotničenka pointed to the experience of Poland, where the Catholic Church began a similar investigation eight years ago but has still not achieved results.

He said questions remained about the methodology, independence and financing of such an investigation. Over the past eight years, he added, the Polish Catholic Church had tried to answer these questions, while the original idea had changed radically by the time of the current decision.

Although Sotničenka did not rule out the need for an independent audit, he said it was important to establish its purpose and determine what it could change today. The Church should focus first on protecting children and vulnerable people, he said, adding that the immediate problem should be dealt with before examining what could be done next.

Kaunas Archbishop Metropolitan Kęstutis Kėvalas also said the criteria for an independent investigation had to be clearly defined first. The fact that an investigation might not take place immediately did not mean it was impossible, he said, but the parties needed to agree on what constituted an independent investigation and what criteria would make it adequate and capable of producing the desired result.

Sotničenka also said that opening the archives would not necessarily reveal anything new. He recalled Pope Benedict XVI saying that priests who had committed crimes had been transferred to other parishes in the past, while anonymous complaints had not been accepted. As a result, he said, there was a possibility that the facts would not be fully revealed.