NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times
February 22, 2019
By Elizabeth Dias
The unprecedented summit in Rome on clerical sex abuse in the Roman Catholic Church has drawn participants from around the world. But there is one country with a particularly large stake in what happens at the Vatican this week.
The clergy sex abuse crisis has engulfed the American Catholic Church for months, as leaders contend with growing state and federal investigations, and ordinary Catholics grow weary of waiting for the Vatican to finally resolve the crisis.
The yearning for a response from Pope Francis yielded on Friday a first step to holding bishops accountable for abuse in their dioceses. And it was an American — Cardinal Blase Cupich, the archbishop of Chicago — who presented the proposal. But survivors and law enforcement officials say they doubt that the church’s response so far matches the magnitude of the crisis sweeping the United States.
“Now all they are going to do is set guidelines again?” Mark Belenchia, 63, an abuse survivor and activist in Jackson, Miss., asked on Friday. “That is gibberish as far as I am concerned.”
Cardinal Cupich, who presented the proposal for increased bishop accountability, told his colleagues at the conference that the faithful had a right to doubt the church when abuse was “covered up” to protect the abuser or the institution.
“This is the source of the growing mistrust in our leadership, not to mention the outrage of our people,” he said, urging bishops to listen to victims and to provide “just accountability for these massive failures.” A key step, he suggested, was responding to the frustrations of infuriated laity sitting in their pews.
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