The Vatican narrowed its accountability to shrink responsibility for abuse

Evidence

In February 2014, a UN panel on the human rights of children issued a scathing indictment of the church hierarchy for shielding molesting priests, imposing a “code of silence” regarding their crimes and covering up a widespread scandal. The panel demanded that the Vatican remove molesters, open up files on offending priests and cardinals and bishops who covered up their sexual crimes and to observe civil law requiring report of child abuses to law officials. The panel rejected the Vatican claim that their accountability is limited to the people who live in Vatican City. Given the tight church hierarchy the professed truncated responsibility strains credibility. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 546

Categorization

• XREF: The Vatican’s ‘truncated responsibility’ defense is a textbook displacement/diffusion of responsibility mechanism matching the vault’s claims about institutional rationalization.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 546