ROME
The Daily Beast
by Christopher Dickey
Mar 10, 2013
Archbishop Donald Wuerl fought for justice on behalf of the Church’s sex-abuse victims long before the Vatican did. Christopher Dickey on the odds he’ll be chosen.
Each of the cardinals now in Rome to elect the new pope has long had a church assigned him where he says mass when he’s in the Eternal City. But when Donald Wuerl, Archbishop of Washington, D.C., was made a cardinal in 2010, Pope Benedict XVI gave him a church of singular importance: San Pietro in Vincoli (Saint Peter in Chains). …
Wuerl first came to national attention after Pope John Paul II named him bishop of Pittsburgh in 1988, right in the middle of the first waves of horrific revelations about predatory priests and the shameful way their crimes were covered up by the church hierarchy. His predecessor had just banned three priests in his diocese from public ministry. Another, a former high school principal, was still serving as a diocesan administrator, and after psychiatric treatment Wuerl made him a hospital chaplain.
But a few weeks after that decision Wuerl met with the devout, deeply disillusioned, and increasingly litigious family of one victim. They invited Wuerl to dinner and, according to a lengthy and laudatory report in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2003, when Wuerl left that table his views of the issue had changed. Before, his actions had been closely aligned Church policies, which were basically a CYA masquerading as piety. Now Wuerl told his staff it had to get its priorities straight: the first concern was the injured party, the second was for the person’s family, the third – and only the third – was the potential harm to the church and its reputation. He’s on the record declaring zero tolerance for priests accused of sexual abuse 14 years before that became official policy.
But the accusations just kept coming, until it got hard to distinguish between coverups, counter-charges, and good-faith efforts to set the clergy on a more righteous – and legally defensible — path. In 1993 Wuerl fought to have a priest accused of molesting a young teenager banned from public ministry. But the Vatican reinstated him. Wuerl appealed and fought for two more years before, finally, reluctantly, Rome agreed with the ban.
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