He was present at the 2002 Dallas meeting, heard then-USCCB President Wilton Gregory, now a cardinal and theb archbishop of Washington, share a litany-like confession of bishops’ failures and coverups, and was given time to speak.
Clohessy said that for all the charter’s reforms – which banned any abusers from ministry for even a single offense – its fatal flaw is that it doesn’t punish those who covered up abuse. In a few cases, bishops have resigned amid revelations of cover-up but have rarely been punished.
“This may sound dreadfully cynical, but I hope there’s never another bishop who apologizes,” said Clohessy. “I think apologies in this crisis lull Catholics into complacency. Worse, they imply that everything’s fixed.”
Steven Millies, an expert on the Catholic Church in the U.S., called Gregory’s 2002 apology a historic moment and a powerful gesture, but said in an email that another highly visible one would not be amiss, especially since abuse revelations have continued.
“It’s a terrible mistake to treat the way the church failed its people as a solved problem because it is not a solved problem, even as the Charter turns 20,” said Millies, a professor of public theology at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
He considers the charter a good faith effort by the conference, which he said has no authority, but only “modestly successful” because each bishop gets to decide to what extent they follow it.
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“This is a church controlled more by individual bishops, and the Charter could not overcome that obstacle. That good faith is not really enough,” he said.
Once the new president is elected, one outside Catholic group plans to send the conference a slate of restorative justice proposals developed with clergy sex abuse survivors who still love and participate in the church, said the Rev. Thomas Berg, group member and moral theology professor at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York, in an email.
The proposals include developing a national center to equip the church in restorative justice practices, creating a permanent healing garden, instituting an annual day of prayer and penance for healing and reconciliation and initiating trauma-informed training for clergy, lay leaders and others.
They hope embracing restorative justice could begin a “sea change in the institutional Church’s response to the crisis–toward new approaches that can promise deeper healing,” Berg said.
By Peter Smith, Holly Meyer and David Crary Associated Press
This article originally appeared here.
