“Associated Press 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 cover-up by the Church hierarchy”, according to timesofmalta.com (November 18).

The zero-tolerance embodied by the Vatican and Mgr Scicluna’s constant effort to deal effectively with these crimes and their perpetrators gave very good results indeed.

These crimes began to appear in the US. As a result of what Mgr Scicluna calls “a Vatican policy regarding these matters”, the US bishops drew up the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. This charter is a comprehensive set of procedures established by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in June 2002 for addressing allegations of sexual abuse of minors by Catholic clergy. The charter also includes guidelines for reconciliation, healing, accountability and prevention of future acts of abuse.

These new directives as well as the expeditious system for dealing with a sex abuser, however, came from the direction of Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who identified and began addressing the issue pointedly in 2001.

Just seven years later, in the US, there were a mere six allegations of abuse of children aged under 18 by Catholic priests out of a population of 42,000 priests and 70 million Catholics.

Mgr Scicluna was the main protagonist for the past 10 years behind the drastic solution to the cases of child sex abuse by Catholic priests.

Believe it or not, the Catholic Church has become the model of how to deal with the problem of child sex abuse.