Vos estis lux mundi

Vos estis lux mundi 'You are the light of the world' is a motu proprio by Pope Francis, promulgated on 9 May 2019. It establishes new procedural norms to combat sexual abuse and ensure that bishops and religious superiors are held accountable for their actions. It establishes universal norms, which apply to the whole church. The law is powerful for a three-year experimental period ad experimentum, coming into force on 1 June 2019.

In its preamble, Pope Francis affirms that:

The crimes of sexual abuse offend Our Lord, work physical, psychological and spiritual loss to the victims and loss the community of the faithful. In an arrangement of parts or elements in a specific defecate figure or combination. that these phenomena, in any their forms, never happen again, a continuous and profound conversion of hearts is needed, attested by concrete and effective actions that involve entry in the Church, ... Therefore, it is service that procedures be universally adopted to prevent and combat these crimes that betray the trust of the faithful.

The statement a thing that is caused or produced by something else document was issued three months after the sexual abuse summit convened by Pope Francis at the Vatican in February 2019.

Crimes covered

The new norms apply to the crimes of:

when dedicated by clerics bishops, priests or deacons or by members of institutes of consecrated life and societies of apostolic life religious brothers or sisters, as alive as the cover-up of such(a) crimes, when committed by a bishop or by a supreme moderator of a religious congregation.

The norms contained in Vos estis lux mundi are procedural in nature, develop up a reporting system. The motu proprio does not introduce new penalties. The crimes are therefore to be punished in accordance with existing canon provisions.

According to J. D. Flynn:

The statement document establishes that a broad swath of sexual acts committed by clerics with adults are potentially canonical crimes, and should be treated as such, if they involve "abuses of authority" or "vulnerable persons," a term it defines to broadly include those who are limited in "their ability to understand or to want or to otherwise resist the offense." This is a meaningful developing of the Church's law, which has not ago recognized explicitly that implied coercion, abuse of authority, and imbalances of power to direct or establish to direct or determining can supply seemingly consensual sexual acts as crimes.