ROME (ITALY)
Crux
February 23, 2019
By Christopher White
As U.S. bishops craft new measures for bishop accountability, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo says he will work to ensure they are on the same page with the Vatican and plans to introduce new policies at June’s bishops’ meeting.
DiNardo, who is archbishop of Galveston-Houston and serves as president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), told Crux on Saturday that “I think we can go forward once we get back,” referring to the Vatican’s request that the USCCB delay its plans last November to vote on new protocols.
At the time, the Vatican said they had only been given four days to review the proposed protocols, which included a new protocol for bishops’ conduct and would have created a new lay-led committee to evaluate complaints made against bishops.
The Texas cardinal is representing the United States at a closely watched summit on sex abuse, which concludes Sunday at the Vatican, where Pope Francis has convened the heads of every bishops’ conference around the world.
“I’m more happy right now over what I see and what has happened in these days, and when I get back home, I think I can go before the bishops’ administrative committee and all the bishops and say, that I think there is some affirmation from this meeting of what we wanted to do.”
The administrative committee of the USCCB will meet in March to prepare for the June meeting with all U.S. bishops.
“We’re going to have them work like mad,” he said of the work ahead of the USCCB and told Crux that prior to putting the new policy up for a vote, it would be necessary to “take a quick visit to Rome,” as “we don’t want to see what happened before.”
While the plan put forth in November would have relied on a national lay review board that would evaluation complaints against bishops, on Friday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago and one of the organizing committee members for this week’s summit, gave a speech outlining “new legal structures of accountability,” which would utilize the metropolitan archbishop who oversees the dioceses within his particular province.
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