Badmouthing bishops
As a Catholic, I always sit up straight when fellow journalists editorially lecture the church. I’ve done it a few times myself. But your editorial on the recent meeting of the American bishops (“The bishops duck and cover,” Nov. 17) was built on some astonishingly false assumptions rather nastily put. To wit:
At their important 2002 meeting in Dallas that established protocols for dealing with sexually abusive priests, the bishops did not refuse, as you assert, to establish tough new policies regulating their own behavior. That issue was simply not on the agenda.
The bishops meeting this month in Baltimore did not “cave (ed) to (Pope) Francis’ command” to postpone action. To suggest otherwise — and in such faux tough-guy language — is to misunderstand the bonds of fidelity that tie Catholic bishops everywhere to the Bishop of Rome. Equally off the mark is the assumption that going their own way would have done the church in the U.S. any good without the support of Francis. But to write as you do that the bishops acquiesced in order to keep their jobs is to display the willful ignorance of a prejudiced observer.
The most outrageous statement in your editorial is the casual reference to “child sex abuse scandals that perennially soil the church.” Perennially? The Catholic Church is 2,000 years old, and child abuse surfaced as a scandal only 16 years ago. Moreover, as I reported in the liberal Catholic magazine, Commonweal, there was very little in the Pennsylvania grand jury’s report that we did not already know from The Boston Globe’s 2002 investigative reporting and especially from the subsequent two-year investigation by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the bishops’ behest. Nearly all the alleged abuse in the grand jury’s report occurred in the last century, and most of the priests named were long dead. What was new was the grand jury’s finding that since the reforms of 2003 only two priests from the dioceses studied had credible accusations against them — surely evidence that the procedures are working.
— Kenneth L. Woodward, Chicago