UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Michael Sean Winters | Jun. 6, 2016
The Vatican took an enormously large step towards completing the Catholic church’s assault on the scourge of sexual abuse by clergy on Saturday when Pope Francis issued his motu proprio entitled “Come una madre amorevole” or, in English, “Like a loving mother.” My colleague Joshua McElwee was yet again first with the story and you can find his report here.
The document helps confront the last, critical piece of the puzzle in any effective strategy to confront the scourge of clergy sex abuse: episcopal accountability. Until bishops know that they will be held accountable for their actions and, perhaps more importantly, for their inaction, all the other architecture for protecting children was sitting on a shaky foundation. You can train ministers who work with children. You can adopt norms like those in the Dallas Charter that established zero tolerance for priests and deacons who abuse a child sexually. You can require lay review boards and have diocesan audits. But, unless the bishops who oversee all this know that they are accountable for enforcing the norms and the culture of zero tolerance, it is easy to see how there can be backsliding.
In far too many depositions pertaining to conduct after, repeat, after, the Dallas Charter on Child Protection was adopted in 2002, we see bishops and other diocesan officials thinking that they can handle Fr. X or that they can get Fr. Y to amend his ways. No, no, no. This is too close to the kind of thinking that got us into the scandal in the first place: That also had a heavy dose of thinking a cover up would somehow serve the church, to say nothing of the careers of the bishops and clergy doing the covering up. But, the idea that we can ignore the rules that are in place to handle something on our own, on an issue like this, has proven to be the opening wedge for a regime of laxity and, consequently, the endangerment of children.
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