U.S. Bishops Still Stonewall on Sex Abuse

By David Gibson
Wall Street Journal
June 7, 2012

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303665904577452282863859096.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Who will guard the guardians? Ten years after the Catholic hierarchy of the United States gathered in Dallas and adopted unprecedented policies to address the scourge of child sexual abuse by clergy, the question of accountability at the top remains unanswered.

To be sure, the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People—the Dallas charter, for short—took some critical steps. In June 2002, the bishops passed a "one-strike" policy for abusers and began pushing the Vatican to streamline the processes that would allow them to more easily defrock molesters.

The bishops also vowed to report allegations to the civil authorities instead of keeping them in-house, to more rigorously screen not only seminarians but all church workers and volunteers, and to teach children in Catholic facilities to avoid potential abusers. In addition, they set up an office of child protection to audit each diocese's compliance with the charter, and they established the National Review Board, composed of lay Catholics, to make sure they were doing what they promised.

But throughout it all, the bishops exempted themselves from accountability—even though records showed that feckless inaction by many bishops, or even deliberate malfeasance by some, had allowed abusers to claim so many victims.

The best answer the bishops had to this in Dallas was a behind-the-scenes "fraternal correction" policy, by which a bishop would quietly pass along any concerns about another bishop to that bishop. Church tradition was invoked to preclude any external oversight by laypeople or other prelates. As always, each bishop would answer only to the pope, who alone had the authority to remove the head of a diocese.

Now, as the bishops gather next week in Atlanta for their annual spring meeting, they will hear an update on the Dallas charter but are unlikely to address this enormous loophole—despite events that make it all the more urgent.

Consider that bishops in the Diocese of Baker in Oregon and the Diocese of Lincoln in Nebraska—plus leaders of the six Eastern rite dioceses in the U.S.—have for a decade thumbed their noses at the Dallas charter's mandatory audits of compliance. Thus monitors from the Conference of Catholic Bishops have never been allowed into those dioceses. Yet the recalcitrant bishops have never been rebuked, and last year Pope Benedict even promoted one of them, Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, to the larger see of Santa Rosa, in California.

The diocesan and national review boards are only as effective as the information they receive from bishops. In Philadelphia, the archdiocesan review board was blindsided by a scathing 2011 grand-jury report that unearthed years of abuse that had gone unaddressed, even after the Dallas charter. Now Monsignor William Lynn, the longtime head of priest personnel for the archdiocese, is awaiting a jury's verdict on his fate. But no bishop has been criticized by church authorities.

Similarly, Cardinal Francis George, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago and then president of the bishops conference, left two priests in ministry after receiving numerous credible allegations of abuse against them and after his own review board recommended that the men be removed. Yet Cardinal George's fellow bishops elected him head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2007, and he received no public correction, fraternal or otherwise.

In Missouri, where Bishop Robert Finn of the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph ignored repeated warnings about a priest who had a trove of child pornography on his laptop, there may be some consequences—but only from civil authorities, who are set to put the bishop on trial this September for failing to report the priest.

"In the Dallas Charter, all consequences fall on priests," said a priest in a recent survey of clergy attitudes by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. "Nothing is in there for bishops."

Not only does this undermine the priesthood's morale, but it impedes important work of the bishops, who are engaged in a major campaign for religious freedom—aiming not only to overturn the Obama administration's contraception mandate but to protect the church from secular encroachments of various sorts. If church leaders want the laity and the clergy to follow them to the ramparts on these issues, they should demonstrate that they will hold themselves to the same standards they set for everyone else.