NEW YORK (NY)
America Magazine
February 19, 2019
By Gerard O’Connell
“So much is at stake this week…I hope something important comes from it,” Anne Barrett Doyle, the co-director of BishopAccountability.org, told reporters at the Foreign Press Association in Rome on Feb. 19, two days before the Vatican summit on the protection of minors in the church is scheduled to begin on Feb. 21. But if nothing substantial comes of the meeting, Ms. Barrett Doyle said it is her hope “the energy of change” can be assumed by secular forces “so that changes will come from the outside, through attorneys general, grand jury investigations and so on.”
“The Catholics of the world are grieving, disillusioned,” she said, because of “the sexual abuse of thousands of minors by clergy in past decades and bishops who covered up.”
“We all know,” she added, “that canon law has to be changed so that it stops protecting the priesthood of ordained men over the lives of children.
“I believe the church is no way close to enacting the reforms to end this epidemic,” she said, “which consists of two aspects: the sexual assault on minors by priests and the cover-up by bishops.”
BishopAccountability.org is one of the many advocacy groups for survivors of abuse by clergy that have descended on Rome this week from all over the world to highlight the problem ahead of the summit.
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