UNITED STATES
Hamilton and Grffin on Rights
Jun 15, 2015 | Terry McKiernan
In the children’s rights community, and especially among Catholics, the big news this past week was the decision by Pope Francis to create a new tribunal in Rome, which will try bishops who have covered up child abuse or have enabled the perpetrators. The Pope’s fast action on a recommendation from his Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors – instantaneous by Vatican standards – was a vindication for the Commission, its leaders Cardinal Seán O’Malley and Rev. Robert W. Oliver, and the two highly respected survivors who serve on it, Marie Collins and Peter Saunders.
Pope Francis must now get his new tribunal up to speed very quickly, if it is to cope with the situation in Australia (where a powerful Royal Commission is investigating the role of Pope Francis’s financial czar, Cardinal George Pell, in several abuse cases). The Pope’s speedy removal of Archbishop John C. Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee A. Piché is yet another sign that he considers the tribunal’s work of the utmost importance.
Those actions by civil authorities are a reminder that change has been forced on the Catholic church by survivors willing to come forward, by prosecutors and inquiries able to investigate, and by civil suits that have made public many thousands of pages of evidence. Courage and persistence have now compelled the creation of the new Vatican tribunal, and we will see whether it brings the necessary zeal and transparency to its own work.
In a crucial development, Archbishop Eamon Martin of Armagh, the leader of the Catholic church in Ireland, told reporters after a meeting of the Irish bishops that “justice is indeed retrospective” and that he supports the tribunal’s working on past as well as present and future cases [see transcript with video]. Marie Collins, one of the survivors on the Pontifical Commission, subsequently confirmed that this was the case, raising the possibility that Cardinal Seán Brady, Cardinal Bernard Law, and Cardinal Roger Mahony could soon be experiencing the tender mercies of the tribunal.
While all of this has been unfolding, I’ve been reading the new biography of Archbishop Raymond G. Hunthausen of Seattle, A Still and Quiet Conscience: The Archbishop Who Challenged a Pope, a President, and a Church, by John A. McCoy (Orbis Books, 2015). As a reporter, McCoy covered the archdiocese, and then he worked as Hunthausen’s PR person during the final years in Seattle. The Hunthausen story as McCoy tells it is quite relevant to the tribunal’s retrospective task.
Hunthausen is the last surviving American bishop to have participated in the Second Vatican Council. He was the bishop of Helena MT for thirteen years (1962–1975) and archbishop of Seattle for sixteen years (1975–1991), retiring early at age 70 after an epic battle with Pope John Paul II, who was unhappy about Hunthausen’s anti-nuclear activism, his tax protest, his advocating for Vatican II–inspired reform, or his support of gay Catholics, or perhaps all of the above.
Conspicuous by its absence from that list of causes championed by Hunthausen is child safety. Yet in Helena and Seattle, many of Hunthausen’s priests were molesting children, and a good amount of his time was spent managing those cases.
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