Vocational institutions can evade legal accountability by deflecting blame upward and outward
Evidence
The Vatican continued to evade responsibility for the sexual abuse of children. In representing the Vatican, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi answered questions at a UN panel reviewing the Vaticanās compliance with the international covenant prohibiting torture (Cumming-Bruce, 2014). One can debate the legality of whether the rape of a young child by a priest is an act of torture. However, this is a separate issue. The present analysis focuses on the morality of how the sexual abuses were handled. Tomasi repeated the exonerations that the popeās jurisdiction is confined to Vatican City and that the sex crimes are a product of a permissive culture. What was new was the complete silence on the legal and moral failings of the upper echelon of the church hierarchy. The bishops and archbishops presided over the cover-up, reassigned predatory priests to unwitting parishes, and broke the law by not reporting the sex crimes to civil authorities. The hierarchy continued to be shielded from accountability for their actions until Pope Francis approved a Vatican tribunal in June 2015 to hold bishops who failed to report abuse accountable for their actions. At the civil level, they incurred no penalties for breaking the law. ā Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 549
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- SEED: A piece on āinstitutional moral disengagementā ā how organizations like the Vatican and BBC structurally outsource blame to scapegoats or deflect to peripheral ideological battles instead of owning its core failures.
Related
- Institutions shield upper echelons from accountability by deflecting blame to subordinate causes. (similarity 0.94)
- The Vatican narrowed its accountability to shrink responsibility for abuse (similarity 0.86)
- Religious authorities displace responsibility for abuse onto supernatural agency (similarity 0.81)
- Attribution of blame to demonic forces displaces institutional responsibility (similarity 0.79)