ATLANTA (GA)
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
KEEP THE FAITH > BY TIM TOWNSEND • ttownsend@post-dispatch.com > 314-340-8221 | Posted: Saturday, June 16, 2012
ATLANTA • In 2002, when the U.S. Catholic bishops were deep in crisis mode over an explosion of accusations against priests who had sexually abused minors, Belleville’s Bishop Wilton Gregory was the president of their conference.
Gregory had been elected just seven weeks before the first of the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning stories on a priest who raped children and the archbishop who moved him from parish to parish.
Those stories rippled out across the country and by June, when the bishops met in Dallas, the first African-American to lead them did just that.
Gregory is often credited (and sometimes criticized) for steering the church through the most turbulent years of the sexual abuse crisis. Gregory took flak from some Catholics for championing the Dallas Charter’s “zero tolerance policy,” which requires the permanent suspension of a priest found to have abused a minor.
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