UNITED STATES
National Catholic Reporter
EDITORIAL
Cardinal George Pell, on a leave from his Vatican finance job and presumably from ministerial work, will return to Australia later this month to face charges of sexually abusing minors decades ago. That is a sign of the progress the Catholic Church has made in addressing the abuse of children by clergy.
Indeed, this is not 1985, when the U.S bishops’ conference and the Vatican could bury detailed reports on the abuse of minors and cover-up in Lafayette, Louisiana, and ignore advice from a priest, a lawyer and psychiatrist on how to proceed in transparency and justice. The U.S. bishops would go blithely on for another decade before some individual dioceses would begin to implement policies to handle abusive priests.
This is not 1995, when Austrian bishops elected as president of their conference Cardinal Hans Hermann Groër, archbishop of Vienna, just days after media reports broke about Groër’s sexual affairs with seminarians under his care two decades before. Groër resigned as archbishop by the end of the year, but another three years passed with continual media coverage of Groër’s misconduct with students and adults and a desperate plea from the Austrian bishops directly to Pope John Paul II “to bring the burden of the Groër matter to an end soon,” before Groër went into quiet retirement. John Paul met privately with Groër twice and defended the cardinal against “unjust attacks” until Groër died in 2003. The pope called him one of God’s “faithful servants.”
Throughout his pontificate, too, John Paul staunchly defended Fr. Marcial Maciel Degollado as “an efficacious guide to youth,” even though the founder of the Legionaries of Christ was a serial sexual abuser and fathered multiple children with at least two women. Only after John Paul had died could Pope Benedict XVI force Maciel out of public ministry.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.