By William Wan
Washington Post
April 20, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/20/AR2010042002445.html
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| Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyo speaks in Rome in 2002. Photo by Massimo Sambucetti |
Advocates for victims of clergy abuse are protesting a decision by a local Catholic group to bring a controversial former Vatican official to Washington this weekend to celebrate a Latin Mass at one of the country's most important Catholic churches.
Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos is scheduled to lead a first-of its-kind "solemn Pontifical Mass" on Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Northeast Washington. Castrillon, who served as head of the Vatican's Congregation of the Clergy, made international headlines when a 2001 letter he wrote to a French bishop surfaced last week. In it, he praised a French bishop for not reporting a credibly accused sex offender to police, despite being mandated to report it under French law.
The French bishop, Pierre Pican, was convicted of failing to report child sex crimes to secular authorities. The priest, the Rev. Rene Bissey, was sentenced to 18 years in jail for repeatedly raping a boy and for sexually assaulting 10 other children.
"I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration," Castrillon wrote Pican. "You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest."
On Saturday, Castrillon, now a cardinal from Colombia, again generated a firestorm when he claimed that Pope John Paul II instructed him to send copies of his letter to bishops worldwide.
In response, the victim advocacy group Survivors' Network of Those Abused by Priests announced it was sending letters to Pope Benedict XVI and Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl protesting Castrillon's lead role in Saturday's Mass and calling on them to condemn his remarks and replace him in the Mass.
The group is planning a news conference Tuesday afternoon to enumerate their objections. Meanwhile, the local group organizing Saturday's Latin Mass said they are surprised by the uproar. Leaders of the Washington-based Paulus Institute said they have been planning the Mass since their organization's inception three years ago, and they had hoped it would be the highlight of their efforts to promote sacred liturgy and the traditional Mass said in Latin, which has become a rarity in recent years.
"The reason we invited him is it's a complicated Mass. There aren't a whole lot of bishops who can say it and are available," said Paul King, president of the institute. "The cardinal's personality or that identity associated with him, for the purposes of the Mass are not important. We invited him because he's done this lots of times."
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