UNITED STATES
Rutland Herald
[Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People]
This week marks 10 years since the United States’ Catholic bishops met in Dallas to create sweeping reforms in response to a wave of lawsuits and media reports on child sex abuse by multiple priests and a decades-long cover-up by the leaders in the church. The bishops created the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, which developed a “one-strike” policy to remove priests credibly accused of a single act of abuse, and started steps to allow for swifter defrocking of predatory clerics. The bishops also allowed the abusive priests’ personnel files — cataloging more than 10,000 instances of abuse — to be studied for evidence of patterns by John Jay College of Criminal Justice. All of this was welcome and constructive.
But — and this is a big but — while the church has reached many settlements with victims of the abuse, including a major one here in Vermont, and many priests who were part of this travesty have been jailed, censured, removed from the priesthood and otherwise punished, there remains one group of Catholics who have escaped any accountability: the bishops themselves.
The bishops are at the heart of what is wrong with the Catholic Church. In practice they are accountable only to the Pope — not to the people they are supposed to serve. And the truth is, American Catholicism has moved far beyond the rigid, unaccountable and irrelevant Vatican hierarchy.
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