The Vatican is establishing a study group to more clearly define the crime of “spiritual abuse” in Church law. It follows a swath of scandals involving founders of religious orders and institutions along with other charismatic individuals who have committed abuse under the guise of false spiritual and mystical experiences.
Despite the recent revision of the Vatican’s penal code, which includes broader provisions for laypeople and lay founders accused of abuse, there is still no classified crime for this kind of more spiritual abuse – involving less tangible emotional and psychological manipulation – leaving what many canonical experts have described as a legal lacuna in Church law.
A communique signed 22 November by Cardinal Argentinian Cardinal Víctor Manuel Fernández, prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), and approved by Pope Francis, addresses a longstanding dispute among canonists on the concept of “false mysticism”.
Traditionally, “false mysticism” has been considered a crime against the Faith, under the competency of the DDF, but without a clearly defined legal standard.
Article 10 of the 1995 edition of the DDF’s Regulation, signed by then-prefect Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI, states that the disciplinary section within the DDF “deals with crimes against the faith, as well as the most serious crimes, in the judgement of the superior authority, committed against morality and in the celebration of the sacraments”.
The dicastery, it says, is responsible for a variety of problems and behaviours related to the discipline of the Faith, such as “cases of pseudo-mysticism, of alleged apparitions, of visions and messages attributed to supernatural origins, of spiritism, magic and simony”.
However, according to the DDF’s communique, published on the DDF’s website, the term “false mysticism” is dealt with in a specific context related “to spirituality and alleged supernatural phenomena”, and is now dealt with in the DDF’s doctrinal section.
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