This is partly the subject of Kieran Tapsell’s essay, “Canon Law on Child Abuse Through the Ages.” Tapsell argues that from the time of Gregory XVI in 1842, popes increasingly made the handling of sexual crimes committed by clergy more secretive. The 1917 code dispensed with the requirement to notify and hand over the accused to secular authorities, and Pius XI’s instruction Crimen Sollicitationis (1922) made the entire process a secret one from start to finish. Gone were public “degradations” of offenders, in which clerics were stripped of their status and handed over to the state for punishment. - Crisis Magazine [ https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/examining-the-deep-roots-of-the-abuse-crisis ] Examining the Deep Roots of the Abuse Crisis Darrick Taylor The ongoing sexual abuse crisis in the Church has left many good Catholics shaken, and like many I have tried to understand how this has happened. Obviously, homosexuality in the clergy plays a role, and the all-male nature of the ...
https://www.catholicsforrenewal.org/old_pages/documents/CanonLawOnChildAbuseThruTheAges.pdf CANON LAW ON CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE THROUGH THE AGES Kieran Tapsell1 In 2014 two senior members of the Marist and Christian Brothers in Australia told Justice McLellan, the Chair of the Child Sexual Abuse Royal Commission that in the 1980s the brothers would not have regarded touching a student’s genitals as a crime but only a “moral failure”. 2 McLellan asked Br Shanahan. Q. Can you explain how the Orders would have brought themselves intellectually to that position, describing it only as a moral failure and not a criminal offence? How would they have arrived at that position? A. No, I can't explain it.3 This paper is an attempt to explain it: how bishops, priests and religious all over the world came to regard the sexual abuse of children, not as crimes punishable by the State, but as moral failures that should be dealt with by treatment, and by dismissal from the priesthood or religious life ...