ALLENTOWN (PA)
Morning Call
November 15, 2018
By Paul Muschick
I may be inviting a plague of locusts on my house by saying this. But the Vatican needs to get its act together on how the Catholic church will respond to the sex abuse crisis, or get out of the way of lower church leaders who are trying to do something.
The church had a chance this week to show a new commitment to dealing with clergy sexual abuse of children. But it blew it. Again.
There’s no doubt this time who was to blame — this blunder is on the Vatican.
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met in Baltimore from Monday through Wednesday. Their agenda included highly anticipated votes, in the works since September, to address the problem by improving accountability for themselves.
Proposals included creating a commission, to include lay experts, that would review complaints against bishops; enacting a new code of conduct for bishops; and finalizing how to permanently remove bishops who are found to be abusers.
Vatican asks US bishops not to vote on their proposals to tackle sexual abuse
Monday morning, those votes suddenly were called off.
The president of the conference, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston, told the gathered bishops that the pope did not want them to act on bishops’ accountability until he convened a worldwide summit of church leaders in Februa
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