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Grant Gallicho August 3, 2014
Neither canon law nor civil law processes can help the Catholic Church establish true accountability for the sexual-abuse scandal, argued Jennifer Haselberger during a talk she delivered yesterday at a conference for victims of clerical abuse. Haselberger–former top canonist for the struggling Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis–resigned in protest last year before going public with damning accounts of the way the archdiocese had handled cases of priests accused of sexual misconduct. Noting how difficult it was to acknowledge her role as “a perpetrator”–not of abuse itself but as part of a system that enabled it–she challenged her former colleagues in the Twin Cities and elsewhere to subject themselves to an examination of conscience with respect to their own roles in the scandal.
The Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests held its annual conference in Chicago this weekend, marking the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary. Speakers included Jason Berry, whose pioneering reporting–much of which ran in the National Catholic Reporter–introduced the scandal to a national audience; historian Garry Wills; Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne Burke, who served as an inaugural member of the U.S. bishops’ National Review Board; and Haselberger.
Responding to Pope Francis’s call for “the whole church to find the grace to weep, to feel ashamed and to make reparation” for the sexual-abuse crisis, Haselberger sought to find “concrete actions” the church might take to establish accountability. But she did not spend much time looking for accountability in canon or civil law, which do not “have anything of significance to offer in this regard.” While canonical procedures can be helpful in clarifying the status of accused clerics and removing them from ministry, “the processes are by their very nature incapable of producing the results sought by Pope Francis, or of reconciling the one abused with the broader faith community.”
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