USA Today
October 6, 2009
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2009/10/catholic-church-sex-abuse-minors-bridgeport-egan/1
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| In 2000, Bishop Edward Egan, of Bridgeport, Conn, attended the funeral Mass for the Archbishop of New York, and later that year was named as his successor. Now, the courts are forcing open records of how the Bridgeport dioceses handled sexual abuse allegations against priests. Egan, now a Cardinal, has since retired from the New York post. Photo by Robert Deutsch, USA TODAY |
It's not the sex, it's the cover-up that always seems to nab politicians. Now, the Catholic Church is caught up in headlines, again, over how bishops dealt with clergy who sexually abused minors.
The U.S. Supreme Court has let stand a lower court decision forcing the Archdiocese of Bridgeport, Conn., to release more than 12,000 pages from 23 lawsuits against six priests, which will show how their cases were handled by bishops including now-Cardinal Edward Egan.
(Conn.Post.com has a history of the abuse situation in Bridgeport, dating back to 1993 when 13 people told the diocese they had all be abused by the same priest when they were young.)
Opening records is always fraught with dangers for management -- one of the three tasks of a bishop along with preaching and teaching.
When the abuse scandal erupted in Boston in 2002, it was the personnel records forced open by the courts -- revealing known abusers shuffled to unsuspecting parishes -- that finally forced Cardinal Bernard Law to resign as Archbishop of Boston.
Egan left Bridgeport to become Archbishop of New York in 2000, the post from which he retired in April. His successor, Bishop William Lori fought had to keep the cases, particularly settlements with victims that included privacy clauses, private.
Lori told Associated Press:
Our concern is not about the past but rather about the future, about the impact that these decisions will have on litigants who think they are settling things, and find that they really aren't settled. Also on the First Amendment issues, particularly the freedom of the church, and indeed all churches, to determine who should be a priest or a minister or a rabbi.
But critics and victims groups, celebrating the decision, say the bishops still fail to realize that just removing abusive priests, even ramping up comprehensive prevention programs, doesn't address fundamental questions of how this scandal went on so long, so broadly and deeply.
Dan Bartley, president of the lay reform group, Voice of the Faithful, tells Gary Stern, at Blogging Religiously,
Bishop Lori must stop wasting untold hundreds of thousands of parishioners' dollars to prevent these same parishioners, and the public, from finding out how Lori's predecessors, including recently retired Cardinal Edward Egan, dealt with cases of sexual abuse of children.
Writer and blogger Michael Sean Winters told me he compares Lori's efforts to close off the past to Law's successor in Boston, Cardinal Sean O'Malley who "courageously" forced the Church to face up to it. O'Malley, he says
... insisted that when Pope Benedict XVI came to America, whatever else he did, he had to meet with victims of clergy sex abuse. Cardinal O'Malley even had to go to Rome and meet with the Pope because the trip planners did not want the meeting to happen and kept removing it from the agenda.
Says Winters: "Until bishops stop trying to cover up their mistakes in the past, they will not win back the credibility of their flocks. Nor should they."
DO YOU THINK ... the legal principles at stake here, including the rights of any religious group to choose and manage it's clergy, are in danger because of this decision? Have the bishops, with massive financial settlements with victims and extensive child abuse prevention programs installed nationwide, done all they can to admit past problems and look to the future?
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