NEW YORK (NY)
Crux
June 7, 2019
By Christopher White
When the U.S. Catholic bishops gather in Baltimore next week, the theme of their three-day meeting could largely be summed up as “unfinished business.”
For starters, there’s the unfinished business from seven months ago of enacting new guidelines for bishop accountability. Just ahead of last November’s meeting, the Vatican halted plans to vote for new guidelines for bishops, citing canonical concerns and faulting the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ (USCCB) leadership for not providing Rome adequate time to review the proposals.
More broadly, however, there’s the unfinished business from seventeen years ago of closing the gap in the Dallas Charter – the landmark 2002 document establishing new norms for child protection, which created a “zero tolerance” policy for a priests guilty of abuse, but omitted bishops from the same oversight.
In many respects, the Vatican has done the heavy lifting for this meeting, with last month’s new universal Church law, Vos estis lux mundi (“You are the light of the world”) issued by Pope Francis, which makes it mandatory for all clerics and members of religious orders to report cases of clerical sexual abuse to Church authorities, including when committed by bishops or cardinals.
Known as a motu proprio, meaning a change to Church law under the pope’s authority, the law went into effect on June 1 and now it is up to bishops’ conferences from around the world to implement it on a local level, with a deadline of June 20, 2020 to have a system in place.
For cases in which a bishop is being accused of abuse or its cover-up, Vos estis relies on the metropolitan archbishop to conduct an investigation and allows for the involvement of lay experts in the process to ensure proper oversight and accountability.
When the U.S. bishops convene next Tuesday to Thursday, the “Directives for the Implementation of the Provisions of Vos estis lux mundi Concerning Bishops and their Equivalents,” will be put to a vote, which builds on the motu proprio’s framework and situates it in the U.S. context.
According to a draft of the proposed directives obtained by Crux, the 4-page document would establish a national third-party reporting system to receive complaints of abuse or cover-up and then report it to the appropriate ecclesial authorities.
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