DENVER (CO)
National Catholic Register
March 6, 2019
By Joan Frawley Desmond
Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago received a respectful hearing from Church leaders at the Vatican summit as he outlined his updated plan for deploying metropolitan bishops to investigate bishops accused of sexual abuse and negligence.
Back home, however, there are strong indications that his proposal faces a hard sell, as Church leaders and lay experts weigh reforms designed to restore the bishops’ credibility in the wake of the McCarrick scandal.
“There are still questions about ‘who knew what’ regarding McCarrick,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, told the Register.
“And now there is simply a lack of trust about a system involving metropolitans.”
Bishop Paprocki, a canon lawyer, expressed his preference for another proposal before the consideration of the U.S. bishops that was tabled until the completion of the summit: an independent national commission presented at the USCCB meeting in November.
“I am in favor of a national commission that would be consistent” in its approach to allegations against bishops, he said.
Francesco Cesareo, the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ National Review Board and the president of Assumption College, was equally skeptical about a plan he described as “bishops policing bishops.”
“What confidence do we have that this proposal, even if it is obligatory, will be effective?” asked Cesareo, who also cited McCarrick’s role as a metropolitan.
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