Pope appoints Scicluna as Vatican college president

Pope Francis has appointed Bishop Charles Scicluna as the President of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

He will head a team composed of four cardinals and two bishops.

This appointment means that Scicluna, who has been serving as Apostolic Administrator since the resignation of Archbishop Paul Cremona, will not be able to become Malta’s next Archbishop.

The congregation’s aim is to “spread sound Catholic doctrine and defend those points of Christian tradition which seem in danger because of new and unacceptable doctrines”.

Scicluna, a canon lawyer, had served as Promoter of Justice within the Congregation between 2002 and 2012 , where he was tasked with investigating cases of sexual abuse within the clergy.

In the words of La Stampa’s Andrea Tornelli,. Scicluna “embodied the line of zero tolerance of sexual abuse against minors, adopted by Pope Benedict XVI, and supported the Pope’s efforts to change canonical laws and existing laws and above all, the mentality: he placed special emphasis on the suffering of abuse victims and promulgated a series of ‘emergency’ laws.”

Addressing a Vatican bishop’s conference on abuse in 2012, Scicluna compared the ecclesiastical cover-up of sexual abuses to the Mafia’s code of silence, “omerta’”.

“Enemies of the truth include the deliberate denial of known facts and the misplaced concern that the good name of the institution should somehow enjoy absolute priority to the detriment of disclosure,” Scicluna said.

In 2012, the Vatican magazine named Scicluna as one of its top ten people of the year who they believed served as examples of courage, charity and fidelity to the Church.