The announcement comes after mounting criticism that the high degree of confidentiality has been used to protect paedophiles, silence victims and keep law enforcement from investigating crimes.
In a new document, the Pope decreed that information in abuse cases must be protected by church leaders to ensure its “security, integrity and confidentiality”.
But he said “pontifical secret” no longer applies to abuse-related accusations, trials and decisions under the Catholic Church’s canon law.
“This is an epochal decision,” Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, the Vatican’s most experienced sexual abuse investigator, told Vatican Radio.
The lifting of pontifical secrecy in sexual abuse investigations was a key demand by church leaders, including Scicluna and the German cardinal Reinhard Marx, at a summit on sexual abuse held at the Vatican in February.
They argued that secrecy in cases of child sexual abuse was outdated and that some church officials were hiding behind it instead of cooperating with authorities.
Scicluna said that while documentation from the church’s in-house legal proceedings will still not become public, the new provisions opened up ways to communicate with victims and cooperate with the state.
“Certain jurisdictions would have easily quoted the pontifical secret … to say that they could not, and that they were not, authorised to share information with either state authorities or the victims,” he added.
“Now that impediment, we might call it that way, has been lifted, and the pontifical secret is no more an excuse.”
One of the documents also raises the age under which pictures of individuals can be considered child sexual abuse images “for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using whatever technology” from 14 to 18.
The new documentation was issued on Tuesday, the Pope’s 83rd birthday.
