Church 'missing the boat' with sex abuse rules

The Vatican is "missing the boat" with new rules published on Thursday on the handling of cases of sex abuse by priests, a US-based advocacy group said.

"The guidelines are like attacking at an elephant with a pea-shooter when the elephant is almost out of range," the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests said in a statement.

"Even if these new guidelines are obeyed, their impact on the ongoing crisis is likely to be insignificant," it added after the Vatican ordered quicker investigations of paedophile priests and extended the statute of limitations.

"Across the globe, top Catholic officials ... deceive or stonewall law enforcement officials, let known predators live unsupervised instead of putting them in treatment centres (and) vigorously oppose any meaningful secular efforts to expose Church wrongdoers," SNAP said.

"Changing these behaviours, not internal Church guidelines, is what is needed," it added.

The new rules notably do not deal with handing abusers over to civil criminal authorities, a key demand of advocacy groups.

Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi said the rules were part of Church law and thus "exclusively concern the Church (while) compliance with civil law" was already an instruction contained in guidelines published in April at the height of the abuse scandals.

In addition, internal Church investigations will remain behind closed doors "in order to protect the dignity of everyone involved," Fr Lombardi said of a decision that SNAP called "extremely disappointing and reckless".

The accelerated procedures provide for an "extra-judicial decree", or referring the most serious cases directly to the Pope with a view to defrocking offending priests, Fr Lombardi said.

SNAP responded: "Defrocking a predator, by definition, is too late. Severe harm has already been done. So the focus must be on the front end, not the back end, of the crisis."

Regarding the extension of the statute of limitations to 20 years from the previous 10 years after a victim's 18th birthday, SNAP said: "Somewhat greater access to a secretive, cleric-dominated process is hardly progress."