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A Times Editorial
The final compromise to oust any priest who abuses minors is a credit to Catholic Church leaders. However, it falls short by not defrocking them.
© St. Petersburg Times, published June 18, 2002
By declaring their intention to remove even one-time sex abusers from their priestly duties, America's Roman Catholic bishops have taken a critical step toward rebuilding public faith in the church. No priest who abuses a child has a place in the ministry. It is regrettable the bishops failed to go further by defrocking these priests and disciplining bishops who chose for years to look the other way. Yet the policy is an encouraging start, provided the 180 near-autonomous dioceses in the nation genuinely commit to change.
The speed with which the bishops, who met in Dallas last week, reversed a weaker proposal for ousting abusive priests is a credit to church leaders who recognize the legal, moral and financial dimensions of this scandal. It would have been a disastrous result had the bishops tried to put a number on the times it was acceptable for a priest to molest a child. The final compromise calls for the removal of any priest who has ever abused minors from the active ministry, but to avoid the more complicated and divisive issue of whether these priests should be defrocked.
Though this approach falls short of the true meaning of "zero tolerance," the Dallas reforms hit at the heart of the scandal. Problem priests would be removed from an environment where they could harm a child again, their names would be forwarded to the police and a new, powerful oversight board would ensure that the bishops are open, cooperative and accountable.
The bishops also laid a foundation for ending the secrecy that surrounded their handling of abuse cases. Victims will no longer be encouraged to settle cases on confidential terms. Bishops will share more complete background records of priests they transfer around the country, and new internal boards will review the administrative decisions of individual bishops. The bishops also agreed to cooperate in a broad study of child sexual abuse, an important move that could highlight deficiencies in the church's screening and education of priests.
But the public also wanted to see from the bishops an example of the moral clarity that is a driving force of the Catholic Church. Indeed, when the scandal first broke, many Catholics took strength by believing the claims of many bishops that they, too, had been in the dark about the extent of the abuse. Now the public sees the bishops ignoring their responsibility for the scandal. Some bishops enabled abusive priests to continue molesting minors by moving them to unsuspecting parishes. One message the bishops needed to send was that many within their higher ranks needed to answer for the scandal. Instead, they left Dallas with new regulations that rely on the bishops to police themselves.
The bishops should have heeded the view of Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, the chairman of a new panel that will review the church's sex abuse policies. Keating says that bishops who helped to cover up past abuse by their priests are guilty of obstruction of justice. He said he will ask the pope to remove bishops who have protected abusive priests.
The bishops who rallied for a conservative approach said they did so because the Vatican was apprehensive about bold reform. That is a twisted view of whom the bishops are supposed to serve, and it misses the point of what Pope John Paul II told American cardinals in April, when he said abuse was "rightly considered a crime by society . . . (and) also an appalling sin in the eyes of God."
Although the bishops didn't go as far as some of the victims of sex abuse had demanded, they came up with a policy that makes it less likely that abusive priests will prey on children in the future. The public will now wait to see whether this same group of powerful church leaders are prepared to hold themselves accountable if there are more victims.