VATICAN CITY
GlobalPost
Jason Berry
Francis doesn’t actually have the power to fix the crisis. Bishops do.
As clergy child abuse scandals jolt the church, Pope Francis has defrocked predatory bishops from Peru and Poland after secret Vatican proceedings. He also intervened on a victim’s behalf in Spain, which emboldened prosecutors to indict a priest who was part of an alleged ring of clergy abusers in the Grenada diocese, according to press reports.
“A zero tolerance approach must be adopted,” Francis told reporters on an airline press conference from Tel Aviv to Rome last May, a sentiment he has backed with action in the intervening months.
But the 17-member papal advisory commission on the abuse crisis faces a glaring loophole over bishops who have sheltered predators — a loophole that creates a tripwire to Pope Francis’s stated goal.
“There’s no place in ministry for those who abuse minors,” Francis wrote in a Feb. 5 letter to the world’s bishops. “Everything must be done to rid the Church of the scourge of the sexual abuse of minors and to open pathways of reconciliation and healing for those who were abused.”
Francis entreated the bishops to see that instructions from a 2011 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) letter are “fully implemented.”
But the 2011 CDF “Circular Letter” to bishops on protocols for abusive clerics has policies that have already failed. The 2011 document, signed by then-CDF prefect Cardinal William Levada and his undersecretary Archbishop Luis F. Ladaria, tells bishops to follow civil and canon law “as thoroughly as possible.”
“The return of a cleric to public ministry is excluded if such ministry is a danger for minors or a cause of scandal,” the document reads. It is the bishop who decides if danger or scandal exists.
“In fact, this is what bishops have always done,” BishopAccountability co-director Anne Barrett-Doyle told GroundTruth. “The CDF sees a bishop as judge and jury. He can forgive a guilty priest if he wants to after some clinic stay, and put him back in the saddle. That’s what the American bishops did for decades until it blew up on them.”
The history of the crisis in Ireland, North America and Australia is one of bishops who risked reassigning known predators who then found fresh victims. In reaction to the explosive media coverage of 2002, the American bishops adopted new norms, or guidelines. …
Depth charges from the Philippines
A new BishopAccountability report, “Sexual Misconduct among Priests in the Philippines,” dissects the CDF 2011 policy on the heels of Francis’s remarkable trip to the islands.
“We have identified 12 cases of allegedly abusive priests that raise immediate concerns about child safety,” Barrett-Doyle and co-director Terry McKiernan said in a letter with the report to a new member of the Pontifical Commission on the Protection of Minors, Filipino psychotherapist Gabriel Dy-Liacco.
“At least half of these [dozen] priests are still active in Philippine parishes, and none appears to have been laicized,” they wrote.
The Boston-based researchers identify two priests as repeat offenders from America, noting that the Philippines bishops’ conference knew about their backgrounds.
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