BALTIMORE (MD)
Catholic News Service
November 18, 2018
By Carol Zimmermann
The gathering of U.S. bishops in Baltimore Nov. 12-14 on the heels of the clergy abuse scandal that hit the Catholic Church this past summer had echoes of the 2002 bishops’ meeting in Dallas, which took place just months after the Church was also reeling from a clergy sexual abuse crisis that made headlines in The Boston Globe.
But the two meetings reflected different times and also ended with different results.
Both meetings involved U.S. Church leaders facing allegations of sexual misconduct and cover-up among their own ranks and the laity’s demands for action amid feelings of strong distrust of church hierarchy.
“They were starting from scratch” in 2002, said Jesuit Father Thomas Reese, a senior analyst at Religion News Service, about the bishops’ response then to sexual abuse charges in the Church.
Standards the Church still uses to protect children and deal with abusive priests were developed at that meeting, but the bishops at that time failed to address standards of episcopal accountability, which this year they discussed but didn’t vote on.
At the Dallas meeting, Reese, who was then the editor of America magazine, was a guest anchor at a CNN desk on site, which indicates the extent of news coverage for the June 13-15 meeting.
Both meetings were the bishops’ typical twice-yearly meetings as a body. The spring meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is usually in June at different locations each year and the fall meeting in recent years has always been in Baltimore.
Both the Dallas and the Baltimore gatherings were almost entirely devoted to the Church crisis, along with time for prayer, and both years abuse victims addressed the bishops.
Typically, media coverage of bishops’ meetings is pretty sparse. Last year, about 40 reporters attended the fall meeting in Baltimore. This year, the number jumped to 160, but many of these reporters left during the first day when it was announced at the meeting’s opening that the bishops would not be voting on responses to sexual abuse as planned.
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