UNITED STATES
The Wall Street Journal
By DAVID GIBSON
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.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.