WALTHAM (MA)
BishopAccountability.org
Statement by Anne Barrett Doyle
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.
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