Rather than heed the law – or follow system rules and regulations – the
church continued to believe that individual priests could make
individual decisions to stop abusing children. Viewed through modern eyes, it seems extraordinary that it took the
Catholic church nearly two millennia to comprehensively condemn slavery.
After centuries of grappling with the issue, including attempts to distinguish between just and unjust enslavement of human beings, the Catholic church gave a full denunciation of slavery in the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/20/fresh-insight-into-pells-response-to-the-child-sex-abuse-crisis-its-not-encouraging#_=_
After centuries of grappling with the issue, including attempts to distinguish between just and unjust enslavement of human beings, the Catholic church gave a full denunciation of slavery in the 1965 Vatican II document Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/20/fresh-insight-into-pells-response-to-the-child-sex-abuse-crisis-its-not-encouraging#_=_