Terence McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, on the right. Following Monday’s shock announcement that the Vatican has requested the US Catholic Bishops to delay voting on new standards for bishop accountability, survivors of sexual abuse and bishop accountability activists decried the move as “totally unacceptable”.
Terence McKiernan, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, called the move a “pre-emptive strike” by the Vatican against US bishops as they seek to respond to the current crisis of sexual abuse and its cover-up “in a modest way”.
Peter Isley, a survivor of clerical sexual abuse who now works with the organisation Ending Clergy Abuse, said the decision from the Vatican effectively means: “We care more about our organisation and our princely titles and positions” than enacting measures of accountability.
New standards
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is gathered in Baltimore this week for its General Assembly, in which they were expected to enact new standards of conduct and accountability for bishops engaged in sexual abuse or its cover-up. At the start of Monday’s meeting, however, USCCB president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston, announced that he had received a request on Sunday afternoon to postpone the vote until after a global summit on the crisis at the Vatican in February.
According to DiNardo, the request came from Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops.
At a press conference outside of the Marriot hotel overlooking Baltimore Harbour, where some 300 bishops representing the nation’s 195 Catholic dioceses were meeting inside, McKiernan was joined by co-director Anne Barrett Doyle who said: “When the Vatican intervenes, it’s a signal that progress will be less than we hoped.”
McKiernan and Doyle both recalled the 2002 USCCB meeting where the bishops enacted a “zero tolerance” policy against priests found guilty of abuse. At the time, the US bishops had to appeal to Rome to amend canon law in the US to accommodate the new policy – a move that some within the Vatican opposed.
“The Vatican was very unhappy with ‘one strike you’re out’, Doyle recalled. “They feared there would be, yet again, dramatic change.”
“On one hand it’s disappointing that Vatican officials continue to feel no urgency about this crisis,” David Clohessy, the ex-national director of Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said.
On the other hand, new policies that bishops are proposing are largely meaningless,” he continued. “Overall the Vatican should be encouraging local bishops just step up more rather than discouraging bishops who want to take some steps, however minimal, toward reform.”