The Duty to Report Abuse Within the Church

Abstract

The contribution reconstructs the duty to report related to sexual abuse (Art. 3 § 1 VELM) according to a fundamental and constitutional rationale with reference to the good pursued and to the nature and limits of the duty. Rationality offers the inescapable hermeneutical criterion of the current legislation. The protected good is not so much the transparency or linearity of institutional activity as the guarantee and trust of people. The new positive-law requirement has not changed the natural matrix of the required commitment; therefore, it is necessary to strengthen the deontological rather than disciplinary awareness of the norm. Intrinsic limits are related to the source and purpose of the information and the prudential assessment of the obligated party (verisimilitude of the information and substantiation of the grounds for suspicion). Extrinsic limits arise from the consideration of demonstrative and evidentiary constraints and the personal situation of the individuals involved. The current provision denotes a clerical and functional restriction of guardianship and invites the operational and conceptual maturation of the church system.