UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
[Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People]
William D. Lindsey
At the end of last week, I linked to a powerful statement of journalist Susan Hogan reminding us that, ten years ago this month–a month in which the U.S. Catholic bishops are now staging shock-and-awe “religious freedom” demonstrations around the nation–the bishops were gathered in Dallas to deal with the explosive situation that had developed as Boston court actions blew the lid off the cover-up of childhood clerical abuse in the Catholic church. Hogan notes that the bishops now want to flex their muscle and appear powerful as they try to topple a sitting Democratic president (the bit about toppling the president is me speaking, not Hogan), but ten years ago the situation was very different.
Then, the bishops felt themselves besieged. They were hunkered down, on the defensive, dodging reporters at the Dallas meeting. Just as they arrived in Dallas for their 2002 meeting, the local paper published an exposé piece providing documentation to show that two-thirds of sitting bishops had shielded a priest they had reason to know was abusing children. The article was accompanied with pictures of each bishop discussed in this survey.
For the public at large and for many lay Catholics, the revelation that a full two-thirds of the sitting U.S. bishops had shielded a known molester of minors was shocking in the extreme. Some of us saw in the gallery of faces in the Dallas paper our own bishops or bishops we knew personally.
When I saw the face of a bishop who had caused quite a bit of misery to my partner Steve and me by refusing tenure to Steve when this bishop was a seminary rector (though the faculty and students of the seminary had voted strongly for Steve’s tenure), I wrote to ask him how he could make the lives of lay theologians who were trying to serve the church so miserable, while protecting priests abusing children. He wrote back a hot response telling me that the media lie and he had been lied about in the article in question, and that I was insolent to send such a letter to him, a rising young star among the bishops of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.
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