BishopAccountability.org
	Marci Hamilton on Tom Doyles Response to John Jay College Study Voice from the Desert January 07, 2010 http://reform-network.net/?p=2504 I would offer one observation as a legal scholar in response to one aspect of Tom Doyle's elegant and thoughtful response to the John Jay Report and the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy's incapacity to change in response to child sex abuse or to take full, honest, sincere responsibility for the hierarchy's crimes and torts against children and society. The problem, from the perspective of someone who studies government, is accountability. Historically, institutions built on top-down control and hierarchy have suffered seriously from lack of accountability. If the bishops are right because they are bishops (and that is the message being telegraphed to the world except in Ireland where the publication of the truth and the law created such accountability demands that 4 bishops have had to resign in shame), they are going to do all they can to hang onto their power without reference to accountability or to higher principles. When institutions cannot change themselves, they have to be altered from outside. When they act in morally and socially degrading ways, the law is there to shift them toward the higher ground. The only answer to the long-embedded cultural corruption of child abuse in the Catholic Church (and many other religious institutions) is a legal system that mandates accountability to protect the vulnerable. The John Jay Study, therefore, is nothing more than a side show on the way to true justice. Happy new year, everyone, and I do hope that we can succeed in 2010 in changing the laws so that children are protected. Marci Marci A. Hamilton Paul R. Verkuil Chair in Public Law Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Yeshiva University
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