"U.S. Bishops Still Stonewall on Sex Abuse"

This issue continues to be in the news. From today's Wall Street Journal:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303665904577452282863859096.html

Who will guard the guardians? Ten years after the Catholic hierarchy of the United States gathered in Dallas and adopted unprecedented policies to address the scourge of child sexual abuse by clergy, the question of accountability at the top remains unanswered.

To be sure, the Charter ... took some critical steps...

But throughout it all, the bishops exempted themselves from accountability—even though records showed that feckless inaction by many bishops, or even deliberate malfeasance by some, had allowed abusers to claim so many victims.

The best answer the bishops had to this in Dallas was a behind-the-scenes "fraternal correction" policy, by which a bishop would quietly pass along any concerns about another bishop to that bishop. Church tradition was invoked to preclude any external oversight by laypeople or other prelates. As always, each bishop would answer only to the pope, who alone had the authority to remove the head of a diocese.

Now, as the bishops gather next week in Atlanta for their annual spring meeting, they will hear an update on the Dallas charter but are unlikely to address this enormous loophole—despite events that make it all the more urgent.

Consider that bishops in the Diocese of Baker in Oregon and the Diocese of Lincoln in Nebraska—plus leaders of the six Eastern rite dioceses in the U.S.—have for a decade thumbed their noses at the Dallas charter's mandatory audits of compliance. Thus monitors from the Conference of Catholic Bishops have never been allowed into those dioceses. Yet the recalcitrant bishops have never been rebuked, and last year Pope Benedict even promoted one of them, Bishop Robert Vasa of Baker, to the larger see of Santa Rosa, in California...

[More examples of how this agreement among the Bishops is skirted]

"In the Dallas Charter, all consequences fall on priests," said a priest in a recent survey of clergy attitudes by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. "Nothing is in there for bishops."

Not only does this undermine the priesthood's morale, but it impedes important work of the bishops, who are engaged in a major campaign for religious freedom—aiming not only to overturn the Obama administration's contraception mandate but to protect the church from secular encroachments of various sorts. If church leaders want the laity and the clergy to follow them to the ramparts on these issues, they should demonstrate that they will hold themselves to the same standards they set for everyone else.