The Vatican sexual abuse summit should consider creating national or provincial Church tribunals to handle accusations that otherwise have to be sent to Rome, the head of the French bishops conference has suggested.
Marseille Archbishop Georges Pontier said he would also urge the summit to encourage better use of archives and retired clerics to help understand the culture that allowed the Church to neglect abuse cases for so long.
"Today there are only two levels for ecclesiastic justice: the diocese and Rome. Isn't a middle level missing?" he asked journalists at a briefing after he met four abuse victims in preparation for the Vatican meeting.
This could help decentralise the canonical justice system, he said. A middle level would be closer to the circumstances of any abuse, he said, while admitting this could make it less objective than an authority further away.
Pontier called the proposed authority a “national or provincial penal ecclesiastic body”.
His second proposal was to focus more on diocesan archives in studying the abuse crisis. Current canon law allows priests’ files to be destroyed 10 years after their deaths.
The “human archives” in the memories of retired clerics should also be tapped to help understand the near past.
This attitude towards archives was not "something calculated or organised. We've simply neglected the archives," he said.
Pontier called the silence of the French Church about clerical sexual abuse of minors was "a collective sin" involving both the local hierarchy that didn't listen to victims and Catholic families that didn't let their children speak of what had been done to them.
"There is an unhealthy veneration of the Church that can block people from speaking out," he said. "There is something systematic in the negligence (of the hierarchy) and the defence of institutions compared to concern for the victims.”
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