UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
Jason Berry | Apr. 11, 2014
Commissions set up by church officials to advise church officials on clergy sexual abuse have a checkered history. No one knows this better than Catholics who answered their bishops’ call to serve, but found themselves and their advice rejected or ignored.
The U.S. bishops named a 12-member blue-ribbon panel of lay advisers amid the firestorm of media coverage in 2002.
“A lot of American bishops would not want to see any of us of the original review board named to this [pontifical] commission,” said Nicholas Cafardi, who served on the National Review Board from 2002 to 2004.
“The report we wrote in 2004 was pretty rough on the bishops,” said Cafardi, a Duquesne University law professor, dean emeritus and canon lawyer. “If [the pope and the Vatican] want a credible board, they should have at least one American who has dealt with the realities. This is hardly something to claim credit for, but we had the largest crisis in terms of victims and perpetrators — more than Ireland, Belgium and Australia — because our country has the biggest church.”
Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, who also served on the original U.S. National Review Board, said the bishops resisted the board on many points, such as whether there would be audits of priest personnel files and who would do the audits. “I don’t think they realized that this was a time bomb and the magnitude of what was left to come.”
She also noted, “The bishops didn’t honestly deal with each other.”
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.