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New Vatican rules equate pedophilia with ordination of women
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of New York Times
Posted: July 19th, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/16/world/europe/16vatican.htm...
The Vatican issued revisions to its internal laws on [July 15] making it easier to discipline sex-abuser priests, but caused confusion by also stating that ordaining women as priests was as grave an offense as pedophilia. The decision to link the issues appears to reflect the determination of embattled Vatican leaders to resist any suggestion that pedophilia within the priesthood can be addressed by ending the celibacy requirement or by allowing women to become priests. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said the changes showed the churchs commitment to tackling child sexual abuse with rigor and transparency. Those measures fell short of the hopes of many advocates for victims of priestly abuse, who dismissed them as tweaking rather than a bold overhaul. The new rules do not, for example, hold bishops accountable for abuse by priests on their watch, nor do they require them to report sexual abuse to civil authorities. But what astonished many Catholics was the inclusion of the attempt to ordain women in a list of the more grave delicts, or offenses, which included pedophilia, as well as heresy, apostasy and schism. The issue, some critics said, was less the ordination of women, which is not discussed seriously inside the church hierarchy, but the Vaticans suggestion that pedophilia is a comparable crime in a document billed a response to the sexual abuse crisis.
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