Doctrine of Faith will classify the crime of “spiritual abuse” to save the lack of protection of adult victims

The prefect for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, is convinced that “it is possible to classify a crime of ‘spiritual abuse’, “avoiding the too broad and polysemic expression of ‘false mysticism’.” This was expressed by the head of the Vatican department in a note in which he even proposes setting up a working group chaired by the prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, Filippo Iannone, to present “concrete proposals.”

With this initiative, Fernández could solve one of the gaps present in the Code of Canon Law and that directly affects adults who have suffered some type of abuse of power, conscience and sexual abuse. If in the case of minors many reforms have been carried out to offer procedural guarantees for victims, these same possibilities do not arise when talking about violated adults..

Spanish reference

Proof of this is precisely the historic ruling of the Madrid Rota. linked to the Franciscan Javier Garrido, who had to be condemned for “false mysticism” due to the lack of a canonical figure that would allow him to be judged for the abuses he had committed.

Now the prefect clarifies that “There is no crime in the Law of the Church classified as ‘false mysticism’, although the expression is sometimes used by canonists in a sense strictly related to crimes of abuse.” In fact, remember that the so-called “false mysticism” appears in the regulations of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith in a “very precise” context, that is, linked to “issues related to spirituality and alleged supernatural phenomena.” . Or what is the same, in Fernández’s words, “false mysticism” refers to “spiritual proposals that damage the harmony of the Catholic vision of God and our relationship with the Lord.”