UNITED STATES
Washington Post
By David Gibson| Religion News Service, Updated: Thursday, June 7
As the nation’s Catholic bishops mark 10 years since they adopted sweeping reforms to address the sexual abuse of children by clergy, the 800-pound gorilla in the chancery remains a lack of accountability for the bishops themselves.
That gap also remains the single greatest obstacle to ensuring the safety of children in Catholic parishes and schools and to restoring some measure of credibility for the bishops — and, by extension, the entire Catholic Church in the U.S.
“Bishops should be accountable to their people, to their priests,” Nicholas Cafardi, a canon and civil lawyer who teaches at the Duquesne Law School in Pittsburgh, writes in the current issue of U.S. Catholic magazine.
“But authority without accountability is tyranny,” writes Cafardi, who once headed the bishops’ National Review Board that was established to ensure compliance with their own reforms.
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