NORWICH (CT)
The Day
By LISA MCGINLEY
Night City Editor
Published on 5/18/2005
So far, the casualties of the Catholic Church's sex-abuse scandal have been: the grievously scarred victims of pedophilia; the communities where defrocked pedophile priests take up new addresses and careers, unannounced and unrecognized; the good men now carrying out their priesthoods under a cloud; uncounted Catholics disgusted with the church; and the dioceses hemorrhaging money for lawsuit awards.
That leaves one category of American Catholics that either could have prevented this before or repented for it since: the bishops, whose reactionary response to public outrage was a zero-tolerance policy that can snatch away in an afternoon the career of even an unfairly accused priest.
Very little has ever come out about clergy sexual abuse because a bishop voluntarily released records. But a new Web site, BishopAccountability.org, is set to publish all the records it can get relating to abuse complaints, reassignment of accused priests and other details most dioceses have refused to release. Its founders are going after the Norwich diocese.
At a meeting Sunday in Niantic the local chapter of Voice of the Faithful, lay Catholics who have been meeting since the sex-abuse scandal in the Boston archdiocese, introduced the founders of the new Web site, which is seeking to post online records kept by the Diocese of Norwich.
Posted by kshaw at May 18, 2005 05:40 AM