UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler
Jun 11, 2015
By creating a new Vatican tribunal that will judge bishops accused of negligence in abuse cases, Pope Francis has addressed the second of three companion scandals that have rocked the Catholic Church worldwide in the early 21st century.
As I explained a decade ago in The Faithful Departed, it’s inaccurate to speak about the “sex-abuse scandal” as a single problem. The scandal actually involved three different problems, which came to light in quick sequence.
First we learned that many Catholic priests—a small minority of priests, but still a large number—had molested children and adolescents. That was horrifying news, and the public rightly demanded action. At their historic meeting in Dallas in June 2002, the US bishops instituted a “zero tolerance” policy that called for effective disciplinary action against any cleric credibly accused of abuse.
But there was one crucial flaw in the Dallas Charter. To work effectively, it required conscientious leadership from the bishops. And unfortunately, the second scandal – which had been exhaustively documented by the time of the Dallas meeting—was the massive failure of leadership in the part of the American hierarchy.
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