UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
EDITORIAL
In recent decades, the Vatican apparatus has found the means to reach deep into the ranks of the faithful to banish, condemn, excommunicate and otherwise impose disciplines on those who advanced a discordant idea or advocated for the wrong cause or dared to question the exclusion of women from any meaningful level of decision-making within the church.
Yet, more than 30 years after the first national exposé of the sex abuse crisis ran in the pages of NCR, we are still waiting for a clear, transparent and workable system for getting rid of bishops who ignore, abet or cover up crimes against the community’s children or fail to abide by rudimentary cautions and procedures for accountability.
We hope the latest iteration of Vatican determination to hold members of the hierarchy accountable, Pope Francis’ newly promulgated universal law, will finally address that long-standing deficiency.
Unfortunately, the motu proprio with which we were presented June 4 raises many questions.
For years, theologians and other thinkers have been banished from Catholic academic grounds, their reputations ruined in a wide swath of the community, for ideas considered out of bounds. We watched as Pope John Paul II engaged in the equivalent of a hostile takeover of the Society of Jesus and replaced its leadership. We watched then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger engineer the removal of an editor of America magazine because he didn’t like some of the topics covered. In the last eight years, at least half a dozen priests have been removed from active ministry for publicly supporting the ordination of women to the priesthood.
But bishops who covered up abuse, kept secret files and shuffled predatory priests from parish to parish and sometimes to other dioceses and even other countries to avoid detection? Nothing.
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