BALTIMORE (MD)
Catholic Review
November 16, 2018
By Christopher Gunty
While the U.S. bishops ended up taking no concrete action regarding the sexual abuse scandals in the church during their Nov. 12-14 meeting in Baltimore, Archbishop William E. Lori told the Catholic Review he would not wait for the U.S. bishops to approve a code of conduct for bishops to ensure that he and the archdiocese’s three auxiliary bishops would be held to the same standards as other clergy, seminarians, employees and volunteers.
“In almost every diocese, including the Archdiocese of Baltimore, there is a code of conduct, and so we are certainly bound … by that code of conduct,” he said. Furthermore, bishops are to be held accountable to what they pledged to do in the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People and their accompanying norms, approved by the U.S. bishops in 2002.
“In the charter and the norms, we set how we would handle cases, … we enunciated the standards of behavior that we expect of other clergy. In our statement of episcopal accountability back in 2002, we pledged that we would hold ourselves to everything that is in the charter,” he said.
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