ROME (ITALY)
Crux
February 25, 2019
By Christopher White
If the global clergy sex abuse crisis was once thought of as an “American” problem, Pope Francis’s efforts to get the global Church to take the issue seriously may now be drawing on American solutions.
Seventeen years ago, 2002 marked a turning point for the U.S. clergy abuse crisis. Bishops tangled with Rome to amend canon law and enact a “one-strike and you’re out” policy for abusive priests – something which, at the time, was criticized in Rome and elsewhere as a distortion of Church law and a typically American form of “cowboy justice.”
Yet as bishops gathered around the world in Rome this week for an anti-abuse summit convened by Francis, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Ireland told reporters he believed the universal Church was moving “much closer” to enacting that American innovation as a global policy.
In an interview with Crux on Saturday, the president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, offered a similar conclusion.
“The Church is moving toward zero tolerance,” he said, but “it isn’t quite there yet.”
Further, the case of former cardinal and priest Theodore McCarrick, who rose through the ranks of power in the U.S. and within the Vatican, while abusing both minors and seminarians, has now prompted a global conversation in the Catholic Church on the need for oversight of the Church’s bishops.
On Friday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago and one of the members of the summit’s organizing committee, called for “new legal structures of accountability” for bishops who abuse or are negligent in handling cases of abuse.
His proposal would charge the metropolitan archbishop with the responsibility for overseeing investigations into bishops accused of abuse in conjunction with a local review board. Cupich later added that it’s a model that would allow a more local response and follow-up with abuse survivors.
Speaking at a press conference on Friday, Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston and president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, said that the 2002 Dallas charter on the protection of children made “a huge difference” in the way the Church responds to sexual abuse.
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