UNITED STATES
Newsday
BY CAROL EISENBERG
STAFF WRITER, This story was supplemented with wire service reports.
June 17, 2005
U.S. Roman Catholic bishops are expected to vote today to preserve the core tenet of their so-called one strike and you're out policy to protect children from sexually abusive priests, even as they fine-tune provisions to give themselves greater discretion.
"No one wants to permit children to be abused in the church," said Chicago Cardinal Francis George, who led a team of U.S. bishops who worked with Vatican officials on the revisions. "It's a source of great shame for all of us, a source of scandal for the faithful and for the world."
While the revised policy would bar guilty priests from ministry, victim and lay advocates say other proposed changes let the bishops off the hook in terms of accountability.
"I find some of these changes troubling," said Illinois Appellate Judge Anne Burke, who headed the national lay panel that monitored bishops' compliance until her term expired in November.
Burke referred to new language describing the national panel originally set up to monitor bishops' compliance as "consultative," rather than "independent," requiring appointees to be vetted by local bishops and allowing clerics and nuns to serve in place of lay Catholics, according to documents.
"Absolutely, this is an attempt to rein in the review board and trying to diminish their ability to proceed independently," Burke said. "They're obviously responding to their dislike for the way the former board conducted itself."