Bishops Continue to Define Response to Sex Abuse Despite Vatican Call for Delay

By Thomas Reese
National Catholic Reporter
November 16, 2018

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As the U.S. bishops' meeting in Baltimore ends Nov. 15, the most newsworthy happening is still Monday's last-minute instruction from the Vatican to delay any vote on new procedures to sanction or otherwise deal with bishops who had either abused children or failed to remove abusive priests from ministry.

The instruction, in the form of a letter from the Congregation of Bishops in Rome, threw the gathering in Baltimore into chaos on its opening day.

The president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, openly expressed his disappointment with the Vatican's intervention. He and other bishops felt their house was burning down, and the Vatican was asking them to delay turning on the fire hoses.

Other bishops were secretly relieved. Some questioned the proposals for how to deal with abuse, which had been put together quickly in response to the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the scandal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick. Those who wanted the reforms to pass feared they would fail to get the necessary two-thirds vote for passage. Now both groups could buy time while blaming the Vatican for their inaction.

From any vantage, the Vatican intervention was extremely disappointing. It contradicts everything Francis has said about empowering bishops' conferences and decentralizing decision-making in the church. It was also a public-relations disaster for the pope, who is already losing the confidence of Catholics on the abuse issue, according to a September poll from the Pew Research Center: Only 31 percent of Catholics thought the pope was doing a good or excellent job handling the sex abuse scandal, down from 55 percent three years ago.