Mgr Charles Scicluna has told the Associated Press that his promotion to serve as Auxiliary Bishop in Malta wasn't the latest casualty in the Vatican's turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues.
"When Pope Benedict XVI announced last month he was transferring his respected sex crimes prosecutor to Malta to become a bishop, Vatican watchers immediately questioned whether the Holy See's tough line on clerical abuse was going soft - and if another outspoken cleric was being punished for doing his job too well," the news agency said.
But in an interview on the eve of his departure from Rome, Mgr Scicluna insisted he wasn't the latest casualty in the Vatican's turf battles and Machiavellian personnel intrigues. Rather, he said, his promotion to auxiliary bishop was simply that - "a very good" promotion - and more critically, that his hardline stance against sex abuse would remain because it is Pope Benedict's stance as well.
"This is policy. It's not Scicluna. It's the Pope. And this will remain."
Besides, he said laughing over tea at a cafe' on Rome's posh Piazza Farnese, "If you want to silence someone, you don't make him a bishop."
AP noted that in his decade on the job (in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) Mgr Scicluna became something of the face of the Holy See's efforts to show it was serious about ending decades of sex crimes and cover-up by the church hierarchy.
"Short, round and affable, with tiny hands and a garrulous laugh, Scicluna, 53, didn't speak out frequently, since much of his work was done behind closed doors, covered by pontifical secret.
"But when he did, it carried weight.
"Scicluna embodied the zero-tolerance line on sex abuse," AP said, quoting veteran Vatican reporter Andrea Tornielli.
Mgr Scicluna insisted he not only will continue to work with the Holy See on abuse issues, but will do so with the authority of a bishop, a job he considers his vocation after marking his first quarter-century as a priest last year.
"So I can tell bishops to listen to me now as a fellow bishop. That gives me in the Roman Catholic Church a qualitative leap into what I say." he said.
Mgr Scicluna acknowledged that the Pope has yet to discipline any bishop for negligence in handling an abuse case. While Cardinal Bernard Law resigned in 2002 after the abuse scandal erupted in his Boston archdiocese, he wasn't sanctioned and was in fact named archpriest of one of the Vatican's pre-eminent Rome basilicas - a cushy promotion to his critics.
"The rules are there but they need to be applied" when it comes to disciplining bishops who botch abuse cases, Mgr Scicluna said. "People make mistakes. They need to repent and change their ways. But if they are not able to repent and change their ways, they should not be bishops."
See full interview as published in The Seattle Times http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2019706313_apeuvaticanchurchabuse.html