Vatican doctrine chief: Cases of spiritual abuse demand clear canon law

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The Code of Canon Law must more directly address the frequent spiritual manipulation and abuse of office wrought by members of the church to solicit sex, the Vatican’s doctrinal chief said.

“Various dicasteries frequently received reports or complaints about situations where spiritual elements were used as an excuse or motivation to have sexual relations,” Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, said in an interview with Alfa y Omega, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Madrid.

“In these cases, there is a manipulation of people who entrust themselves to a spiritual guide and at the same time a manipulation of the spiritual beauty of our faith in order to obtain sex,” he said.

In the interview published Jan. 23, the cardinal said that the lack of a specific offense in canon law regarding spiritual abuse makes it “necessary and urgent to address it, because we have discovered that it is unfortunately not uncommon.”

The dicastery released a document in November 2024 stating that the pope had approved its creation of a working group with the Dicastery for Legislative Texts to analyze possibilities and present concrete proposals to classify the crime of “spiritual abuse.”

In the interview, Cardinal Fernández said that greater clarity is needed in canon law since the only recourse currently is canon 1399, which states that unspecified violations of divine and canon law can be punished with a just penalty “only when the special gravity of the violation requires it, and necessity demands that scandals be prevented or repaired.”

However, the cardinal said, “when a serious crime becomes very frequent it is not advisable to have to refer to such a general canon,” especially because it is difficult to use a general law to apply a severe penalty.

Creating a precise classification of spiritual abuse is essential, he said, otherwise “any misconduct could be reported as a serious offense or be punishable by a maximum penalty,” a situation that could lead to a “generalized suspicion” among members of the church or create a “cancel culture.”

“When everything seems to have the same gravity, we end up committing an injustice in the face of particularly serious cases that must be confronted with greater force,” he added.

The prevalence of spiritual abuse in the church was particularly noticed after news reports about the former Jesuit and artist Father Marko Rupnik, who was accused in 2022 of spiritually manipulating women for decades to receive sex acts. A Vatican investigation into the priest, who was expelled from the Jesuits, is ongoing.

Cardinal Fernández said that the study group is not preparing proposals to apply solely to the case of Father Rupnik since “it would prejudice the objectivity of the work” but that the dicastery’s investigation into him is continuing and an independent tribunal is currently being prepared.

Though Cardinal Fernández said that cases bordering on spiritual abuse are “not always easy to adequately prove” and punish, he said that certain cases of “special perversity” — such as having sex in sacred places under the pretense that it would foster a special relationship with God — should receive the maximum penalty allowed by canon law.

The study group, chaired by Archbishop Filippo Iannone, prefect of the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, will look at classifying the crime of spiritual abuse and studying interpretations of existing canon law that could include spiritual abuse. The result could be a new definition of spiritual abuse in canon law or a modification of existing laws to make clear their application in cases of spiritual abuse.

Those steps are important, Cardinal Fernández said, because current cases of spiritual abuse are treated as cases of “false mysticism,” however that term also captures purely doctrinal errors that are not necessarily crimes.

“But canonists need to typify a crime with another name –‘spiritual abuse,’ for example — so as to not always have to resort to canon 1399 when judging such a serious, scandalous and frequent crime, and to avoid the confusion that the broad and obscure meaning of the expression ‘false mysticism’ could generate,” he said.