The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHY VATICAN KEPT BISHOPS FROM DEALING WITH SEX ABUSE
At issue is why the Vatican blocked a vote on measures.
VATICAN CITY — The Vatican blocked U.S. bishops from taking measures to address the clergy sex abuse scandal because U.S. church leaders didn’t discuss the legally problematic proposals with the Holy See enough beforehand, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press.
The Nov. 11 letter from the Vatican’s Cardinal Marc Ouel- let provides the primary reason that Rome balked at the measures that were to be voted on by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at its Nov. 12-14 assembly. The blocked vote stunned abuse survivors and other Catho- lics who were demanding action from U.S. bishops to address clergy sex abuse and cover-up.
Ouellet’s letter undermines the version of events provided by the conference president, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo. It could also provide fodder for questions this week during a spiritual retreat of U.S. bish- ops, dedicated to the abuse crisis, that opens today in Chicago.
They may want to know why the draft proposals from the U.S. only arrived at the Vatican on Nov. 8, four days before the U.S. bishops’ meet- ing began. While the Vatican is known for its slow pace, even the speediest bureaucracy would have found it difficult to review and approve sensitive legal documents over a long weekend.
“Considering the nature and scope of the documents being proposed by the (con- ference), I believe it would have been beneficial to have allowed for more time to con- sult with this and other con- gregations with competence over the ministry and discipline of bishops,” Ouellet wrote to DiNardo. Such backand-forth, he wrote, would have allowed the documents to “properly mature.”
The main goal of the U.S. bishops’ fall meeting had been to approve a code of conduct for bishops and create a lay-led commission to receive complaints against them. The measures were a crisis response to the scan- dal over ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, once a senior American cleric who is now accused of molesting minors and adults, and new revelations of old sex abuse cases and their cover-up in Pennsylvania.
DiNardo stunned the bish- ops when he opened the assembly Nov. 12 by announcing that “at the insistence of the Holy See” the bishops would not be voting on the measures after all. He said the Vatican wanted them to delay a vote until after Fran- cis hosts a global summit in February on preventing sex abuse by priests.
While DiNardo blamed the Vatican, the letter from Ouel- let suggests that the Vatican felt that DiNardo had tried to pull a fast one by inten- tionally withholding legally problematic texts until the last minute. That the Vatican would have wanted a say in crafting the texts is not surprising, given the Holy See alone has exclusive author- ity to investigate and discipline problem bishops.
“While fully aware that a bishops’ conference enjoys a rightful autonomy ... to discuss and eventually approve measures that are within the conference’s powers, the conference’s work must always be integrated within the hierar- chical structure and universal law of the church,” Ouel- let wrote.
In a statement Tuesday, DiNardo characterized the disconnect as a misunder- standing. He said he assumed the Vatican would have had a chance to “review and offer adjustments” to the measures after the U.S. bishops approved them, not before. He insisted that U.S. bishops were not trying to appropri- ate Vatican powers.
“It is now clear there were different expectations on the bishops conference’s part and Rome’s part that may have affected the understanding of these proposals,” DiNardo said in a statement. “From our perspective, they were designed to stop short of where the authority of the Holy See began.”
The U.S. strategy, it seems, was to avoid drawn-out nego- tiations before the vote so the U.S. bishops could present the Vatican with documents after the fact.