UNITED STATES
Crux
John L. Allen Jr.
EDITOR
May 13, 2018
News Analysis
In one of our earliest talks over the years, the late Cardinal Francis George of Chicago gave a precocious young reporter a valuable piece of advice: “Be careful about using the word ‘unprecedented’,” he said. “In the Catholic Church, everything has happened at least once.”
Thus it is that as the bishops of Chile arrive in Rome this weekend for meetings with Pope Francis Tuesday through Thursday on that country’s clerical sexual abuse crisis, we can certainly call the summit “extraordinary,” but not a complete novelty. In fact, we’ve seen a version of this show before: April 23-24, 2002, when all the residential cardinals in the United States, along with the top two officers of the U.S. bishops’ conference, were summoned to Rome to discuss the abuse scandals exploding in America.
Looking back, that summit turned out to be a watershed.
It may be difficult to remember now how all-compassing the atmosphere of crisis was in that moment. In early 2002, the Catholic sex abuse scandals, initially centered on Boston and then rippling across the country, appeared on the front page of the New York Times forty-one days in a row, eclipsing the previous record set during the peak of the Watergate scandals in 1974 that brought down the Nixon administration.
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.