SOUTH BEND (IN)
The Observer
April 8, 2019
By Claire Rafford
In January of 2002, when the Boston Globe Spotlight team released an article exposing the sexual abuse crisis in Boston parishes, the Catholic Church entered a state of deadlock. In response to the mass allegations, Church leaders met in Dallas that June and created the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The charter established several stipulations, including a key way for lay communities to check their clergies’ power: the creation of review boards.
“Article II of the charter asked that every dioceses and group form a review board, and that the majority of its members are to be laypersons not in the employment of the diocese or the religious order,” Fr. Peter Jarret, assistant provincial and vicar of the Congregation of Holy Cross, said. “So pretty much every entity — all the dioceses, religious communities which are broken up into provinces — formed review boards.”
The lay review board lives on in the Congregation of Holy Cross to this day. Its current purpose is to review allegations of sexual assault made against Holy Cross priests and brothers.
The board is mainly made up of lay people who have some expertise in law or psychology, Jarret said. The board includes a psychologist, two attorneys, one former prosecutor, an education [worker] and a mother and Holy Cross parishioner, among others.
“It’s a consultative body to the bishop — or in our case, to the provincial of the United States Province of Priests and Brothers of Holy Cross,” Jarret said. “If one of our members were to receive an allegation of sexual abuse of a minor about one of our members, we would of course inform the authorities right away and remove that person from ministry. But we would use the board to help us investigate, or they would be kind of our sounding board in terms of how to proceed.”
The board members are appointed, not elected, and serve for a six-year term. Jarret said the Holy Cross provincial, or head of the order, is also elected for a six-year term, and another three-year term if he is re-elected, so leadership often tries to coincide board member terms with the term of the provincial.
Jarret said the congregation has very specific procedures to follow when a person comes forward with an accusation against a Holy Cross clergy member.
“We would respond immediately and remove the person from active ministry,” he said. “And then if the person is currently a minor, or it happened when the person was a minor, we would notify the police, the authorities and then work with them to do an investigation. We would usually meet with the person making the allegation and listen to their story, and all that would get written up, and if there’s other people that were involved in terms of someone who witnessed it or had knowledge of it … we write all that up and we would call the review board together and we would present all that to them and they would help us think through it.”
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