Word: bishopate
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Joseph Sullivan read with some apprehension the language on clerical child abuse that his brother bishops passed by a 239-to-13 vote last Friday in Dallas. It looks as if "we've just hung the priests out to dry," said the Brooklyn auxiliary bishop. Despite some complaints from victims, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops document is laudably tough on priests who abuse: any molester, past or future, will be forbidden to wear a collar, celebrate a public Mass or publicly call himself a priest. But the superiors who enabled the behavior got off easy. The document's defenders...
...plan may also face trouble in Rome. Dallas Bishop Joseph Galante, one of the drafters of the document, predicts that "if they offer any changes, it will just be tweaking." But a canon-law expert close to the Vatican says some there perceive a "guillotine" attitude in the U.S. that sacrifices priests' rights to public opinion. It may not bode well that one of the most interested Vatican Cardinals is Dario Castrillon Hoyos, a papal contender who has hinted that the crisis is driven mostly by the American press...
...Bishop Wilton Gregory, 54, was elected president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops last November. The word Cardinal is all but stamped on his forehead. Though an early supporter of lay panels to address abuse cases, he is very much a conservative clergyman in the mold of Pope John Paul II, and this week he and his fellow bishops meet in Dallas to discuss how to handle the church's problems. He spoke last week with TIME Midwest bureau chief Marguerite Michaels...
...awful. I'm a priest and a bishop, and I wanted to be a priest from the time I was in the sixth grade. And my own experience of priests from the time I was a youngster has only been of the finest priests that I know. Yes, it's shocking...
Dallas is about us as bishops. The spotlight has shifted from the priest who abuses to the bishop who doesn't handle the situation fairly. We must convince our people that first of all we are terribly open and contrite. And we have a firm resolve to mend our ways...