UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage

William D. Lindsey

As April began, I wrote that I agree with Spanish Benedictine theologian Teresa Forcades that, while we welcome positive signs of change in the way Pope Francis is modeling papal ministry now, we must also wait and see how he will deal with the “basic questions.” At the top of the list of those questions is the ongoing crisis in the Catholic church caused by abuse of minors by Catholic religious authority figures.

On that front, the article that Stacy Meichtry and José de Córdoba published in Wall Street Journal* on Sunday is not promising news. As Dennis Coday notes in a summary of this article in National Catholic Reporter yesterday, under the leadership of Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) the Argentine conference of Catholic bishops missed a deadline for formulating and implementing guidelines to deal with abuse in the Catholic church…