Transparency on sex abuse requires more than just clerics

CHARLESTON (WV)
Gazette-Mail

April 11, 2019

By Vincent DeGeorge

While Baltimore’s Archbishop William Lori and the Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston (DWC) invoke “transparency” and “accountability” regularly regarding clerical sex abuse, they struggle to put these concepts into action.

Disconnects between Lori and DWC higher-ups versus our secular authorities and West Virginia Catholics seem almost insurmountable, as Catholic leaders continue evading actual transparency, accountability and too many significant questions.

In October, Lori and the local diocese invoked transparency when releasing a list of West Virginia Catholic clergy accused of abuse that omits former diocese bishop Michael J. Bransfield, even as we hear his name and detailed abuse allegations in lawsuits from our attorney general and former seminarians.

What’s more, they continue to keep hidden the now-completed report of Archbishop Lori’s investigation into Bransfield, despite calls to release it. Both the attorney general and the diocese’s current highest-ranking official, their day-to-day administrator, layman Bryan Minor, have called for its release. “Yes, my recommendation will be, that I will speak up and ask that that [report] be released … And if it doesn’t come out, call me,” Minor said in a meeting in Bridgeport in December. Transparency requires this report be released.

As the Catholic Church repeatedly shows it cannot police itself, actions like that from the attorney general continue to prove necessary. In response to Attorney General Patrick Morrissey’s lawsuit, the diocese referred to the 2002 Dallas Charter policy protecting children, which Lori helped draft. They did not mention, however, that neither Bransfield, nor Archbishop Lori, nor any other bishop is bound to that policy document. Lori explained the exemption of bishops saying that the committee, “would limit it to priests and deacons, as the disciplining of bishops is beyond the purview of this document.” And this is the problem.

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