ROME
Boston Globe
Strong policies on abusive priests vital for new pope, O’Malley says
By Lisa Wangsness
Globe Staff / March 5, 2013
ROME — Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley said Tuesday that the next pope must make sure the Roman Catholic Church adopts measures to deal with bishops whose “malfeasance” allowed abusive priests to remain in ministry.
O’Malley said in an interview that the successor to Pope Benedict XVI will need to continue Benedict’s campaign to get bishops across the world to adopt policies for dealing with accused abusers. That should include procedures for disciplining bishops who protect abusive priests, said O’Malley, among dozens of cardinals gathered at the Vatican.
The US bishops adopted a zero-tolerance policy on clergy sexual abuse a decade ago, requiring removal from ministry of any priest credibly accused of abusing a minor, but some church leaders have not followed it. The bishop of Kansas City was convicted last fall of failing to report child abuse by a priest, but the church has not sanctioned him.
“There needs to be a path” for disciplining bishops, O’Malley said. “Right now, it’s not terribly clear, but it’s something the next pope will have to deal with.”
Without a protocol in place, he said, it falls to the Vatican to decide what to do with each errant bishop on a case-by-case basis. “My point is always that if you don’t have policies, you’ll be improvising, and when you improvise, you make a lot of mistakes,” he said.
The Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston discussed some of the issues at stake in the papal election in a brief interview Tuesday in a corridor of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, a peaceful hilltop seminary about 10 minutes by foot from the Vatican.
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.