KANSAS CITY (MO)
National Catholic Reporter
June 6, 2019
By Peter Feuerherd
As the U.S. bishops prepare to meet June 11-14 in Baltimore, with sex abuse concerns at the top of their agenda, they don’t lack for advice.
Across the Catholic spectrum, groups and individuals have issued statements and offered declarations about how to fix the church.
John Carr, a retired staff member for the U.S. bishops and now director of the Initiative on Catholic Social Thought and Public Life at Georgetown University, urged the bishops to keep their focus.
“Empathy, urgency and action,” should be their mantra, he told NCR.
He sees Pope Francis’ latest letter issued motu proprio (on his own initiative), a document that called for worldwide accountability to address the issue of sex abuse, as a recognition by the Vatican that sex abuse “is a global problem that requires local action.”
The pope’s directive cites bishops as accountable for their personal actions as well as failure to address sex abuse in their dioceses, a concern that grew after the revelations about former Washington, D.C., cardinal Theodore McCarrick last year.
Carr, a survivor of sex abuse inflicted while he was a young seminarian, said that whatever the bishops come up with, it should involve the participation of laypeople in diocesan boards and in judgements of offending priests and bishops.
That view is not unique to Carr. Across the Catholic ideological spectrum, the call for lay involvement is a unifying message. Beneath that, differences about what change is needed come less from a liberal/conservative split than they do from divisions between those who still retain some trust in the bishops and those who don’t. The issue has been debated and argued about for more than three decades since NCR first published accounts of sex abuse in the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, in June 1985.
Those who think that bishops can still get the church on track include the leadership of the Napa Institute, an organization for active Catholics with wealth and traditional leanings.
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