Cardinal O'Malley Announces New Vatican Commission on Child Sex Abuse Statement by Anne Barrett Doyle, Co-Director, BishopAccountability.org, 781-439-5208 December 5, 2013 BishopAccountability.org cautiously welcomes Cardinal O'Malley's announcement in Rome today that the Vatican will form an advisory commission on the sex abuse of minors in the Church. It's good that the Vatican will be giving this terrible problem focused attention. But we are concerned that the commission will be toothless and off-target. Cardinal O'Malley's list of its possible "lines of action" has two crucial omissions. There is no indication that the commission will study either the Vatican's culpability or the crucial need to discipline bishops, religious superiors and other church supervisors who enable child rape and molestation. Judging from Cardinal O'Malley's list of possible lines of action, it appears he hopes the commission ultimately will recommend the "American solution" to the crisis. This would be good and bad news. The US bishops' Charter and Norms are by far the strictest child protection rules in the global Catholic Church. But these measures have fatal inadequacies. They omit accountability for church supervisors, and they have a hidden laxness: bishops are allowed to keep accused priests in ministry until their guilt is established according to the church's own inscrutable criteria. Today in the archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, we see the calamitous consequence of both the impunity of bishops and the lenience toward accused priests. As long as these flawed policies persist, children will be unsafe in the US Catholic Church. We also are wary of how Cardinal O'Malley himself has managed the crisis. His response has been heavy on PR and light on real change. As leader of the Boston archdiocese since 2003, he has made moving apologies to victims and staged rituals of public repentance. But he continues to keep secrets about accused priests and allegations. In 2011, he finally released a long-promised list of accused priests, but it was false transparency. It included not one name that was not previously public. In fact, O'Malley admitted to withholding the names of 91 accused archdiocesan priests, and he refused to name any of the dozens of accused religious order clerics who worked in Boston. See our Fact Sheet on O'Malley's leadership. We fear we see at work in Rome this week the O'Malley formula -- PR with no disclosure of information. We sadly doubt it is a coincidence that today's big announcement comes a day after news of the Holy See's disingenuous report to the UN's Committee of the Rights of the Child. Furthermore, Pope Francis's own record in Argentina does not bode well for the new commission. In his 15 years as archbishop of Buenos Aires, he refused to meet with victims and he made no disclosures about accused priests. We hope the new commission signals a radically new commitment by Francis to transparency and to care for victims. But we are concerned that the opposite is true -- that instead it will give the Vatican cover for more stonewalling of information about abusers and the supervisors who enable them. About BishopAccountability.org Founded in 2003, BishopAccountability.org is the world's largest public library of documents related to the abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. An independent non-profit, it is not a victims' advocacy group and is not affiliated with any church, reform, or victims' organization. Contact Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director, 781-439-5208 Terence McKiernan, co-director and president, 508-479-9304

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