UNITED STATES
The Open Tabernacle: Here Comes Everybody
Posted on June 23, 2017 by Betty Clermont
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) held their semi-annual meeting June 14-15 in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Child Sex Abuse
They began with a Mass “held in response to a call from Pope Francis for all episcopal conferences across the world to have a Day of Prayer and Penance for victims of sexual abuse within the Church.”
In an excellent work of investigative journalism, Nicole Sotelo researched the location of 33 Chicago Archdiocese former priests accused of child sex abuse who are still alive. She was able to locate the whereabouts of 29. “At least 16 – approximately half – of the abusive former priests currently reside or have recently resided within close proximity of a school or child services facility, ranging from less than 500 feet to under 1,500 feet….Two are currently in state or federal mental health facilities. [O]nly one former priest is part of a sex offender registry.” None are being monitored by the archdiocese.
“Church officials covered up crimes for so long that in many cases the statute of limitations for criminal charges expired. [I]t is a sobering reminder that if Church officials had not shielded these men from the law or fought to keep the statute of limitations, some of these men would be registered sex offenders and, thus, identifiable to concerned parents and teachers,” Sotelo noted.
Shortly before their meeting, the bishops released their 2016 Annual Report on clerical sex abuse in the U.S. For the years 2014, 2015 and 2016 combined, 1333 victims made “new credible allegations” against 799 clerics. Even a conservative extrapolation from Sotelo’s findings would be horrific.
In their report, the bishops do not give us the names of the credibly alleged predators, nor which ones are free men and where are they located, nor which ones – if any – they reported to the police. They do not act because Pope Francis protects sexual predators and so, will never hold them accountable for following his lead.
During the Mass, Archbishop Wilton Gregory said the U.S. bishops “can never say that we are sorry enough for the share that we have had in this tragedy of broken fidelity and trust – the clergy sex abuse crisis.” But he failed to commit to the above measures nor did he pledge that the bishops would stop obstructing statute of limitations reform for all American victims of sex abuse.
As Marci Hamilton, a distinguished scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote on June 15, New York’s Child Victims Act amending the statute of limitations “would have been law long ago but for the bishops’ lobbying against it … Indeed, they invest millions and concoct arguments to scare lawmakers away from doing what is right for the unjustifiably exiled victims … The diocesan bankruptcy filings to date have generally been a way of reorganizing to protect assets, to keep victim compensation low, and to cut off future claims for past victims.”
Republicans are primarily responsible “for blocking simple legislative change that would identify the hidden predators and provide justice to victims” killed the New York legislation on June 21.
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