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TRANSCRIPT
Pope Francis’ experimental rules for handling clergy sex abuse expired this week.
The document containing those regulations, Vos Estis, was issued in May 2019 ad experimentum for a three-year period that concluded on Wednesday.
In tonight’s In-Depth Report, Church Militant’s William Mahoney looks at the pontiff’s document and the background leading up to it.
After the “summer of shame” in 2018, Pope Francis issued his motu proprio Vos Estis the following May. The summer of shame exposed now–ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick (a homosexual pederast) along with numerous U.S. and Vatican bishops who covered for him and enabled his rise to power.
Vos Estis covered clergy sex abuse of minors under 18, adults when the abuse involved violence or threats through abuse of authority and the manipulation of vulnerable persons. The rules also touched on the production and distribution of child pornography.
Vos Estis required every diocese in the world to set up a public and easily accessible system for submitting reports on sex abuse. The motu proprio states clerics and religious who notice or have reason to believe another cleric or religious is guilty of sex abuse are “obliged to report promptly the fact to the local ordinary where the events are said to have occurred or to another ordinary among those referred to in canons.”
The motu proprio did not require clergy sex abuse be reported to civil authorities; it merely noted the obligation to report to Church hierarchs did not impede any country’s laws on reporting sex abuse to that country’s authorities.
Vos Estis was issued a few months after the February 2019 Vatican sex abuse summit, officially called the “Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church.” Chicago’s Cdl. Blase Cupich was part of the leadership for that summit. Cupich forbade any discussions on homosexuality or disgraced ex-cardinal Theodore McCarrick.
Vos Estis followed suit, never addressing homosexuality in the clergy or homosexual pederast Theodore McCarrick.
The United States has been the home of at least 11 Vos Estis or Vos Estis–like cases since the regulations were issued in 2019.