Vatican orders bishops to wait on sex abuse vote
BALTIMORE — Facing a reignited crisis of credibility over a child sexual abuse scandal, the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States came to a meeting in Baltimore on Monday prepared to show that they could hold themselves accountable.
But in a last-minute surprise, the Vatican instructed the bishops to delay voting on a package of corrective measures until next year, when Pope Francis plans to hold a summit in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis for bishops from around the world.
Many of the more than 350 American bishops gathered in Baltimore appeared stunned when they learned of the change of plans in the first few minutes of the meeting.
“I am sorry for the late notice, but in fact, this was conveyed to me late yesterday afternoon,” said Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “Although I am disappointed, I remain hopeful that this additional consultation will ultimately improve our response to the crisis we face.”
The order from Rome is the latest twist in a long power struggle between the American bishops and the Vatican over how to respond to the abuse crisis. For nearly three decades and three papacies, the United States has been the focal point of the crisis, and the American bishops have been pushed to the forefront of the response. But the Vatican has sometimes applied the brakes when the Americans have tried to take steps that have not been adopted by the global church.
The delay was immediately denounced Monday by abuse survivors and advocates who had travelled to Baltimore from across the country to put pressure on bishops to take action.
“This is a disaster, and I think it’s a dark day for Catholics, especially victims and survivors,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, codirector of BishopAccountability.org, a research and advocacy group based in Boston. “When the Vatican intervenes, regulations get weaker, not stronger.”
Peter Isely, an abuse survivor from Wisconsin and leader of Ending Clergy Abuse, an advocacy group, said in an interview: “This is a completely cowardly decision by the American bishops. They could still vote on it, and let the Vatican rescind the votes.”
Many Catholic commentators have called the abuse scandal the greatest crisis in the Catholic Church since the Reformation.
Since June, a prominent American cardinal has been forced to resign, a Pennsylvania grand jury has found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 child victims, and more than a dozen state attorneys general have opened investigations into the church. And that is just in the United States.
Bishops in countries like Italy, Chile, Australia and India are now facing accusations of coverups, and in some places, investigations by law enforcement authorities as well.
The great unfinished business of the long-simmering abuse scandal has been the failure of the bishops to discipline themselves. American bishops passed a “charter” of measures in 2002, after the scandal erupted in Boston, but those steps were focused on discipline for abusive priests.
The initiatives that the American bishops had planned to debate and vote on in Baltimore included creating a hotline for reporting cases of sex abuse, a lay review board to hear allegations against bishops, and a mechanism to permanently sideline bishops who are judged to be abusers themselves.
DiNardo said at a news conference that he did not know whether Pope Francis himself had requested the delay. He said that when he met with the pope in October, Francis was “very positive.”
The cardinal said he learned of the delay order in a letter from the Vatican office known as the Congregation for Bishops, and he suggested that the Vatican’s objections could be related to “cultural heritage.”
While he did not elaborate on what that meant, the Americans’ urgency to act has sometimes been dismissed by the church’s predominantly Italian headquarters at the Vatican.
DiNardo also said another reason for the delay could be that the measures proposed by the American bishops were seen in the Vatican as requiring changes to canon law.
He cast the delay as merely a “bump in the road,” and suggested that there was some wisdom in waiting until after the global bishops’ conference next year takes up the same questions.
Sex abuse is a “universal” problem, the cardinal said, “and the church has to handle it universally.”