On Monday 19th March 2006 the diocese of Chicago released reports which showed that, even after the worst scandal in US Catholic history, the Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, had failed to follow guidelines that he himself had helped to draw up.  He had kept in ministry a priest abuser who had then abused again.

"You read it, and you weep,” the cardinal said in a March 2006 interview, speaking of the consultants' report into his own behaviour.

This is an eerie replay of a story that Boston Catholics heard in 2002.  There too church guidelines, drawn up by the US church after the first abuse scandals in the 1980s, had been flagrantly ignored by Cardinal Bernard Law.  (Who was then unaccountably honoured by the Vatican.) 

In Ireland our own bishops were aware of the crime of child sex abuse as early as 1987, but didn't draw up guidelines for dealing with abusers until 1996.  (They moved then only because of the storm caused by media revelations in 1994 of the appalling behaviour of the priest abuser Brendan Smyth.)

But in 2002 we learned that, despite these guidelines, Cardinal Des Connell of Dublin had reassigned an abusive priest as chaplain to a Dublin hospital in 1997 - without warning the hospital authorities - just a year after agreeing guidelines that should have prevented this!

The pattern is now well established and documented.  Bishops reappoint dangerous people, are faced years afterwards with their mistakes, express great remorse, draw up new guidelines - and then either forget or ignore those guidelines.  And then don't resign voluntarily for this flagrant betrayal of their high office. As a consequence the prestige that once attached to the office of Catholic bishop continues to plummet.

This is why we would all be most unwise to suppose that the recent fanfares in Ireland over new child protection measures will protect us forever against the mistakes of the past.  They won't.  In the case of at least some bishops they are in large measure a media exercise, designed to counter the bad press of the moment.  They don't get to the root of the problem - that bishops are unaccountable in any immediate sense for the administrative decisions they take.

Yet they cling to unaccountable administrative power as though it was the very essence of the apostolic role.  They are wrong about that as well.  If bishops are not primarily pastors - carers - rather than administrators, how can they put children first, as they claim they are now doing?  They have not yet begun to measure the real depth of the disaster that has overtaken our church - our loss of a sense of the bishop as someone we can trust above all others to care for our children.

This is why Voice of the Faithful stresses the need for structures of accountability in every diocese, and a genuinely influential role for lay people - especially in areas such as financial administration and clerical appointments.

All we know about human nature and human history tells us that undivided and unsupervised power is dangerous.  Already our bishops have seen that they have only been made accountable for past mistakes because they do not control the media, police, judges, courts.  But still they refuse to apply this lesson - the necessity of dividing power - to their own role.

This is the root of the problem.  Undivided power is dangerous and will cause further scandal down the road for the church - until the Christian principle of accountability is applied where it really counts - in the role of the bishop as teacher and pastor of his people.
 

VOTF™
Mission Statement

To provide a prayerful voice, attentive to the Spirit, through which the Faithful can actively participate in the governance and guidance of the Catholic Church.

Our Goals

2. To support priests of integrity

3.To shape structural change within the Catholic Church.

home | survivor support | clergy support | about us | press | contact us | site index

Copyright © 2006 Voice of the Faithful - Ireland.

Voice of the Faithful - Ireland
c/o 2 Greenhill Road, Coleraine, Co Derry, N.I., BT51 3JE.

Voice of the Faithful, VOTF, "Keep the Faith, Change the Church,"
VOTF logo(s), are trademarks of Voice of the Faithful, Inc.