Perhaps the most pressing problem for the Church is how it deals with failures at the very top—and in other countries where abuse cases are only now beginning to surface. “The lacuna in the Charter is around accountability of bishops,” O’Malley said. This is the first in a long list of problems that have bedeviled Church leaders and exacerbated mistrust among survivors and parishioners. Bishops, whose leadership role in the Church is supposedly modeled after Jesus’s apostles, often serve as the highest-ranking Catholic officials located in a given area. But even senior clergy have little ability to exercise control over one another. Currently, there is no formal mechanism in place for punishing or removing one of the thousands of Catholic bishops across the world when he is accused of wrongdoing, short of the intervention of the pope. [...]
But even in Boston, where the archdiocese released a list of credibly accused priests in 2011, the disclosures have been controversial and confusing. For one thing, abusive priests serving in the Boston area who belonged to religious orders, such as the Jesuits, were not included on the archdiocese’s 2011 list. According to O’Malley’s letter from the time, “the Boston Archdiocese does not determine the outcome in such cases; that is the responsibility of the priest’s order or diocese.” The cardinal expressed “hope that other dioceses and religious orders will review our new policy and consider making similar information available to the public.” Many of these organizations, which are all accountable to different civil laws, have still not done so. [...]
Fundamentally, there is a gap between the way the Catholic hierarchy seems to imagine the solution to the sex-abuse crisis and what the public—even Catholic laypeople—sees as possible ways forward: radical changes to the priesthood, including eliminating the requirement of celibacy, and greater roles for women and laypeople in the hierarchy. “It may be at a point now where, regardless of how ancient [the Church] is, for it to survive, it’s going to need to be willing to consider changes … to the way the organization runs,” says Helen Drinan, the president of Simmons University and the former senior vice president for human resources at Caritas Christi, a now defunct Roman Catholic hospital system that was once the second-largest health-care provider in New England. [...]
Popes lead the global Roman Catholic Church, and yet on the issue of sexual abuse, they have often been among the last to recognize the full gravity of the problem, or to act. Perhaps this is a function of insulation, and caution by Roman advisers. Perhaps this was compounded by the bias, held erroneously for so long in the Church, that sexual abuse is an American problem, and is effectively a local concern. It has taken nearly two decades since the revelations in Boston for a pope to bring top clergy together for an extensive discussion on sexual abuse. But even Francis has cautioned against “inflated expectations” for the February meeting: “The problem of abuse will continue,” the pope said at a recent press conference.
No comments:
Post a Comment