Word: bishopate
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...addition to the charter's muscular response to abuse, there is a subtler but equally important message about the treatment of the American Catholic laity. The issue arises twice in the document. The bishops mandate the establishment of clergy-review boards to advise each diocesan bishop on abuse cases, and they specify that a board's majority will be "lay persons not in the employ of the diocese." Some dioceses have had such boards for years, but others do not, and the bishops are aiming for a uniform standard and process for handling accusations. In its conclusion the charter goes...
That puts the bishops in a bind. They have heard the rumblings from the faithful; they know the reluctance of Rome to entertain revolutionary ideas. The sex-abuse scandals may have led to at least one mutually acceptable innovation. Dioceses that have created lay-led panels to advise the bishop in handling such cases seem to have effectively reduced scandal and nourished a sense of enfranchisement. "This board helps the church as well as the people who are directly involved," says Louverne Williams, a retired schoolteacher who serves on a review board in Minneapolis-St. Paul, along with a psychologist...
Advisory panels, however, while a step toward healing a broken trust, are designed to address isolated crimes, not daily life. While intent on reaching out to their flocks as never before, the bishops are not moving toward the kind of representative democracy that some lay activists dream of. "I don't believe that the solution to the church's problem is to replace clericalism with laism," Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told TIME. "I do not see the Catholic Church becoming a democracy." That was not Jesus' vision, he contends...
...gatekeeper. He's calling major shots and major appointments," says a Vatican official, who, like his colleagues, requested anonymity. "He seems to be a quiet, faithful secretary. And I think he is. But even with his quiet demeanor, he has incredible power--and uses it." He reportedly blocked one bishop's appointment to a key post because he considered that priest more vital to the Pope's personal needs...
Their rationale: the bishop's corporation manages property, not priests...