NEW YORK (NY)
Crux
November 9, 2018
By Christopher White
Addressing the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) at the closely watched meeting in June 2002, as the first wave of clergy sexual abuse crisis in the U.S. reached its zenith, then-president Bishop Wilton Gregory promoted new measures of reform and accountability “in a way that ensures it will not happen again.”
Now, beginning on Monday, the U.S. bishops once again will meet to confront the painful reality that while its policies and procedures may have broken new ground, its Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People has failed to hold bishops accountable for abuse and its cover-up.
Following this summer’s wave of sexual abuse revelations – from a Pennsylvania grand jury report that chronicled seven decades of abuse of more than 1,000 victims at the hands of 300 predator priests, which has sparked over a dozen other states to launch similar reviews, to the downfall of former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick who sexually abused seminarians for decades – many Church leaders have conceded that the current crisis is the greatest test the American Catholic Church has faced in its history.
As leaders from the country’s 195 Catholic dioceses meet in Baltimore next week, there are high-stakes expectations that the U.S. bishops will enact new measures to hold bishops accountable and take new steps to restore the trust of the nation’s nearly 75 million Catholics.
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