UNITED STATES
Catholic Culture
By Phil Lawler Jun 08, 2017
The short piece that appears below was originally posted on this site one year ago: on June 6, 2016. The references are now dated (when I refer to “last June,” for instance, it’s now the June before last; and the motu proprio now more than year old), but the logic still holds. We’re still waiting for reassurance that the Vatican under Pope Francis is serious about a crackdown on bishops who ignore sexual abuse.
The new motu proprio is entitled Come una Madre Amorevole, but it might just as well have been named “And This Time We Really Mean It.” The papal document does not (despite what you might have read in the headlines) create a policy for removing bishops who neglect evidence of sexual abuse. The Code of Canon Law already provided for the removal of bishops “for grave causes.” The new motu proprio only clarifies the process for ousting a bishop, and states clearly what everyone should already know: that failure to curtail sexual abuse of minors by clerics is a “grave cause.”
Thus it was already possible—a week or a year or a decade ago—for the Vatican to remove a bishop who protected sexual predators. With the release of the motu proprio we know more about how the Vatican would go about ousting a negligent bishop. We still don’t know whether or when the new procedures will be put to use.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.