US bishops urge colleagues to defy Vatican abuse call

SEVERAL Catholic bishops yesterday urged colleagues at their national meeting in the US to take some sort of action on the clergy sex abuse crisis despite a Vatican order to delay voting on key proposals.

Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, suggested a non-binding vote to convey a sense of the bishops’ aspirations regarding anti-abuse efforts.

“We are not branch managers of the Vatican,” he said. “Our people are crying out for some action.”

Bishop George Murry of Youngstown, Ohio, echoed that call, saying parishioners and priests in his diocese are “very, very angry”.

The three-day assembly opened on Monday with a surprise announcement by Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The Vatican, he said, was ordering the bishops to delay votes on two anti-abuse proposals until after a Vatican-convened global meeting on sex abuse in February.

Cardinal DiNardo indicated there were two principal reasons for the order: to ensure that steps taken by the US bishops would be in harmony with steps decided at the February meeting, and to provide more time for vetting aspects of the US proposals that might conflict with church law.

Even without the option of a formal vote this week, the US bishops proceeded with discussion of the two key proposals. One would establish a new code of conduct of individual bishops; the other would create a special commission – six lay experts and three members of the clergy – to review complaints against the bishops.

The lay members would include experts in law enforcement, social work and psychology, as well as at least one survivor of abuse, Detroit Archbishop Allen Vigneron said.

However, the bishops are under pressure to take additional steps, as stressed in an address to the assembly by Francesco Cesareo, chairman of the National Review Board, which the bishops created in 2002 to monitor the church’s efforts to prevent sex abuse.

“Your response to this crisis has been incomplete,” he said, calling for more accountability. “It is shameful that the sin of abuse was hidden and allowed to fester until uncovered by the secular world.”

He cited the grand jury report released in August in Pennsylvania. It detailed decades of abuse and cover-up in six dioceses, alleging more than 1,000 children had been abused over the years by about 300 priests.

Since then, a federal prosecutor in Philadelphia has begun working on a federal criminal case centred on child exploitation, and attorneys general in at least 11 other states have launched probes.

“How many souls have been lost because of this crisis?” Mr Cesareo said.

Mr Cesareo urged all US bishops to commit to conducting a thorough review of their dioceses’ files, dating to at least 1950, and publicly sharing a list of any clergy who have been credibly accused of abuse of minors or vulnerable adults.

Some bishops had taken this step, he noted, and urged the others to follow suit.

Mr Cesareo also endorsed the conference’s proposal for an investigation of the scandal involving church leader Theodore McCarrick. Pope Francis removed McCarrick as a cardinal in July after church investigators said an allegation that he groped a teenage altar boy in the 1970s was credible.

‘We are not branch managers of the Vatican. Our people are crying out for some action’