BALTIMORE (MD)
Wall Street Journal
November 15, 2018
By Mene Ukueberuwa
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops met urgently this week to address the most recent revelations of sex abuse by clergy. If public anger about past coverups wasn’t enough to spur church leaders into action, the pressure of more than a dozen state investigations presents an ultimatum, forcing bishops to prove they are able to police their own affairs. Yet on the eve of the conference in Baltimore, the Vatican forbade the bishops to adopt practical reforms. The move tears the U.S. church between the authority of Rome and the trust of its followers.
Two abuse stories have battered the American church since the summer: the uninhibited rise of a serial sexual predator, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, and the Pennsylvania grand-jury report, which unveiled sex-crime accusations against more than 300 priests. The bishops’ lack of accountability connects the two stories. Equal among themselves under Catholic law, bishops can’t discipline each other without Vatican intervention. This enables them to cover up abuse in their own jurisdictions—and gives them an excuse to keep quiet about others.
Ahead of the conference, the bishops coalesced around two proposals to impose accountability. The first is a simple code of conduct extending to bishops the zero-tolerance policy for sex abuse enacted for priests in 2002. The second is an independent review board to investigate claims against bishops and refer credible cases directly to the Vatican. “Each bishop would have to agree to allow himself to be investigated by the committee,” San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone told me last week. He described the bishops’ shedding of immunity as “a covenantal sort of relationship” that would allow them to police each other better.
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