UNITED STATES
Island Packet
BY MARY SANCHEZ
The Kansas City Star
June 12, 2015
The Vatican announced it will establish a new tribunal to sanction bishops who fail to protect children from sexual abuse by members of the clergy.
Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.
Maybe that’s a reporter’s jadedness. I’ve spent too many years with the grim details, listening to testimony of victims, reading their depositions in civil cases and seeing how bishops did a stellar job of shielding not the child victims but the accused priests.
And it’s from living in a diocese whose bishop was convicted of failing to report suspected child abuse and was allowed by the Vatican to quietly resign this spring – more than two years after his conviction.
Yes, this move by the Holy See is a positive one. It will exist solely to hear cases involving bishops who have covered up abuse. The bishops, the leaders of the church’s dioceses, have largely escaped punishment in sex abuse scandals.
This is the Vatican playing catch-up. For many victims, altar boys and former parochial school children who are now grown men and women, it’s too late.
Rome cannot sanction the bishops who deserve the most scrutiny. Many of them – the ones who so callously ruled their dioceses in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s – are deceased. Likewise, many pedophile priests from those eras took the secret of their sins to the grave.
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