WASHINGTON (DC)
Religion News Service
February 22, 2019
By Thomas Reese
For Catholics in the United States, one of the most pressing questions about the clergy sexual abuse crisis is how the church should deal with bishops who are accused of covering up allegations of abuse or who have committed abuse themselves.
Two onetime archbishops of Washington, D.C., just to cite the most prominent examples, have been felled in recent months by allegations of their own misconduct or the failure to act on allegations of others’. The cases only compounded complaints that while there is a system in place in the United States for investigating accusations against priests, there is not a good one for dealing with accusations against bishops.
How to deal with bishops’ abuse or negligence is also one of the biggest problems ahead for the Vatican conference on clergy sexual abuse meeting in Rome this week.
Canon law says that only the pope can judge a bishop, but with more than 5,000 bishops worldwide, this is an impossible task for the pope to do on his own.
In a talk to the bishops on Friday at the four-day meeting with the pope here, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich called for clear procedures for dealing with cases that could justify the removal of a bishop.
In his proposal, Cupich suggested that if a bishop is accused of misconduct or of mishandling abusive priests, the metropolitan archbishop of his region should investigate and report his findings to Vatican officials.
Cupich’s proposal is an expanded version of one he put forward last year at the November meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, where it was heavily criticized as having no credibility, since bishops would be investigating bishops.
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