UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
NCR Editorial Staff | Apr. 10, 2014
EDITORIAL
This issue brings together two strains of church life that NCR has been tracking for some 30 years: the sexual abuse of minors by clergy, and the finances of dioceses. It is in these two areas that church leaders are at their most vulnerable.
The sexual abuse of minors by clergy and the subsequent cover-up by those in the church leadership structure have sapped the hierarchy of much of its moral authority. Many times, the church has seemed to be moving on from the immediacy of that crisis, and then something happens — a priest in Newark, N.J., who is supposed to be on restricted ministry is found on youth retreats, or leaders in the St. Paul-Minneapolis archdiocese ignore their own guidelines and the Dallas Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People — and we are plunged headlong back into that morass.
The unprecedented appointment of the new Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors should have been greeted with jubilation — a commission of experts with direct access to the pope is something that could not have been imagined even three years ago. Instead, the announcement comes with many unanswered questions: Who will lead the commission? Where will it fit in the Vatican bureaucracy? What is its exact mandate? Sources have been telling NCR since December that this commission would be decisive in answering concerns of victim advocates, particularly in producing procedures to censure bishops who violate church law on clergy sex abuse. What could have been a watershed moment has done little to assuage critics. It is more than an opportunity wasted. It is the surest sign yet of the tremendous resistance that Pope Francis and his Council of Cardinals are meeting inside the church bureaucracy.
The sexual abuse of minors by clergy cost the U.S. church $109 million in 2013 and a total of $2.74 billion since 2004. But don’t look to the bishops’ annual report on compliance with the Dallas Charter to learn how much your diocese paid into that lump sum; the report doesn’t break down any data that way. Such fundamental information, which Catholics who support their church have a right to know, isn’t available because the bishops don’t want to share it. No national norms require financial disclosure and no mechanism holds bishops accountable.
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