OTTAWA (ONTARIO)
Catholic News Service (via Crux)
By Deborah Gyapong
October 2, 2018
OTTAWA, Ontario – New sexual abuse policies that Canada’s bishops have vowed to implement will focus on prevention but will not include a mechanism to censure a bishop who commits or covers up an offense.
More than 80 bishops and eparchs from across Canada pledged unanimously to implement the sexual abuse document that has been six years in the making and is now set to be released. Previous documents established guidelines but required no commitment from bishops to implement them. Now bishops across the country have pledged to enforce these new national standards.
“What we want is for the Catholic Church to be the safest place for young people,” said Bishop Lionel Gendron, president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, speaking Sept. 28 after the close of the bishops’ annual plenary in Cornwall, Ontario.
Titled “Protecting Minors from Sexual Abuse: A Call to the Catholic Faithful in Canada for Healing, Reconciliation, and Transformation,” the document has been under construction since 2011. It builds on the 1992 document “From Pain to Hope,” which was updated in 2007, Gendron said.
Work on the document was essentially finished before the Church was rocked by recent sex-abuse scandals and cover-ups in the United States and other countries. In June, retired Washington Archbishop Theodore E. McCarrick resigned as a cardinal amid allegations of sexual misconduct. In August, a Pennsylvania grand jury report exposed decades of alleged abuse involving more than 300 priests and other church workers.
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