UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
This is very important news: as Laurie Goodstein reports at New York Times yesterday and as Michael D’Antonio writes for Huffington Post, a group of twelve Catholic nuns and priests has organized to monitor and blow the whistle on cover-up of sexual abuse cases by the Catholic hierarchy. The group calls itself Catholic Whistleblowers, and has set up a website with a link that provides information about how you can support this valuable initiative.
The group has written a letter to Pope Francis (a copy is linked at the group’s website), noting that its members are speaking and acting from the convictions of their consciences, and asking him to revoke the oaths of secrecy on which bishops rely to justify their cover-ups, open files on abuse cases, remove from office bishops who have flaunted justice in abuse cases, and set up an international forum for dialogue between survivors and church leaders.
As Goodstein notes for New York Times, these courageous Catholic leaders think a group of this sort is necessary because it continues to be demonstrated that some bishops in the U.S. ignore their own stated no-tolerance policy, while the annual audits of dioceses, which are based on self-reporting, keep providing clean bills of health to dioceses later found to have ignored the zero-tolerance policy by putting priests known to pose a danger to minors in direct contact with minors.
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