O’Malley: Time runs short to mend church reputation
Cardinal Sean O’Malley says the Catholic Church is failing to hold accountable those in its upper ranks who enabled child sex abuse for decades and fears the troubled institution has little time left to repair its badly damaged reputation.
O’Malley has asked priests to read his statement at Mass this Sunday throughout the Archdiocese of Boston following a damning grand jury report on abuse in Pennsylvania, a claim O’Malley had been warned of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s conduct and allegations pouring from St. John’s Seminary in Boston.
“The clock is ticking for all of us in Church leadership, Catholics have lost patience with us and civil society has lost confidence in us,” O’Malley’s statement says, admitting the church still lacks “clear and transparent systems of accountability and consequence for Church leadership whose failures have allowed these crimes to occur.”
“Words fail,” the cardinal said. “The crisis we face is the product of clerical sins and clerical failures.”
A Vatican spokesman described the church’s response to the Pennsylvania report as “shame and sorrow.”
“The abuses described in the report are criminal and morally reprehensible,” spokesman Greg Burke said in a statement. “Those acts were betrayals of trust that robbed survivors of their dignity and their faith.”
This week, Pennsylvania authorities released a 900page report detailing how 300 predatory priests abused more than 1,000 children over seven decades. The Catholic News Service reported that O’Malley had received a letter from a New York priest in 2005 sounding the alarm on behavior of McCarrick, who allegedly took seminarians to a New Jersey beach house, often sharing a bed with one. O’Malley told CNS his office received the letter but it didn’t fall under the purview of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors.
Pope Francis has so far remained silent on the crises, but Burke said, “Victims should know the Pope is on their side.”
O’Malley said he is optimistic the church can turn itself around by embracing “spiritual conversion” and demanding “legal transparency and pastoral accountability for all who carry out its mission.”