Bishops’ Plan to Curb Abuse Is Derailed

BALTIMORE — Facing a reignited crisis of credibility over child sexual abuse, the Roman Catholic bishops of the United States came to a meeting in Baltimore on Monday prepared to show that they could hold themselves accountable.

But in a last-minute surprise, the Vatican instructed the bishops to delay voting on a package of corrective measures until next year, when Pope Francis plans to hold a summit in Rome on the sexual abuse crisis for bishops from around the world.

Many of the more than 350 American bishops gathered in Baltimore appeared stunned when they learned of the change of plans in the first few minutes of the meeting.

They had come to Baltimore wanting to prove that they had heard their parishioners’ cries of despair and calls for change. Suddenly, the Vatican appeared to be standing in the way, dealing the bishops another public relations nightmare.

“We are not ourselves happy about this,” Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Houston, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, said at a midday news conference. “We are working very well to move to action, and we’ll do it. We just have a bump in the road.”

The order from Rome is the latest twist in a long power struggle between the U.S. bishops and the Vatican over how to respond to the abuse crisis. For nearly three decades and three papacies, the United States has been the focal point of the crisis, and the American bishops have been pushed to the forefront of the church’s response.

The Vatican also applied the brakes in 2002 when the Americans took steps that had not been adopted by the global church, like establishing a “zero tolerance” standard for abusive priests and a national review board made up of laypeople.

The new delay was immediately denounced Monday by abuse survivors and advocates who had traveled to Baltimore from across the country to put pressure on bishops to take action.

“This is a disaster, and I think it’s a dark day for Catholics, especially victims and survivors,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, a research and advocacy group based in Boston, “When the Vatican intervenes, regulations get weaker, not stronger.”

Peter Isely, an abuse survivor from Wisconsin and leader of Ending Clergy Abuse, an advocacy group, said in an interview: “This is a completely cowardly decision by the American bishops. They could still vote on it, and let the Vatican rescind the votes.”

Many Catholic commentators have called the abuse scandal the greatest crisis in the Catholic church since the Reformation.

Since June, a prominent U.S. cardinal has been forced to resign, a Pennsylvania grand jury has found that 300 priests had abused more than 1,000 child victims and more than a dozen state attorneys general have opened investigations into the church. And that is just in the United States.

Bishops in countries like Italy, Chile, Australia and India are now facing accusations of cover-ups, and in some places, investigations by law enforcement authorities as well.

The great unfinished business of the long-simmering abuse scandal has been the failure of the bishops to discipline themselves. U.S. bishops passed a “charter” of measures in 2002, after the scandal erupted in Boston, but those steps were focused on discipline for abusive priests.

The initiatives that the American bishops had planned to debate and vote on in Baltimore included creating a hotline for reporting accusations against bishops, up a lay review board to hear the allegations, and a mechanism to permanently sideline bishops who are judged to be abusers themselves. They also intended to decide on a proposed bishops’ code of conduct.

The bishops knew they were under intense scrutiny and felt a need to show that they were taking action.

“I hope this doesn’t look like a dodge,” Bishop Christopher J. Coyne of Burlington, Vermont, said of the Vatican’s delay order in an interview.

Coyne said the postponement was actually helpful in some ways, because the bishops had received the text of their proposed measures only a week ago, and here were many amendments that needed to be debated and put to a vote.

“Coming into the meeting, I wasn’t all that hopeful we’d be able to accomplish as much as we wanted to,” said the bishop, who leads the conference’s committee on communications.

DiNardo said at the news conference that he did not know whether Pope Francis himself had requested the delay. He said that when he met with the pope in October, Francis was “very positive.”

The cardinal said he learned of the delay order only Sunday, in a letter from the Vatican office known as the Congregation for Bishops.

He suggested that the Vatican’s objections could be related to “cultural heritage.” While he did not elaborate on what that meant, the Americans’ urgency to act has sometimes been dismissed by the church’s predominantly Italian headquarters at the Vatican. DiNardo said that another reason for the delay could be that the measures proposed by the American bishops were seen in the Vatican as requiring changes to canon law.

He suggested that there was some wisdom in waiting until after the global bishops’ conference takes up the same questions next year.

Sex abuse is a “universal” problem, he said, “and the church has to handle it universally.”

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, who rose quickly to speak to the bishops after the surprise announcement about the delay, suggested that they go ahead and debate the measures and take a nonbinding vote in the next two days. He also proposed an extra meeting in March, after the global meeting, to make the new policies final.

A person close to the pope, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, said he believed that the delay was not intended to prevent action on sexual abuse.

He said he thought the pope wanted to see a coordinated global response, and that it did not make sense for the bishops’ conference of one country to move independently ahead of others. He acknowledged that the delay would raise expectations that the global meeting at the Vatican next year would produce concrete results, but he said that was the meeting’s purpose in any case. In an address to the bishops in Baltimore, Archbishop Christopher Pierre, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States, appeared to warn them not to cede too much authority to laypeople.

“Surely, collaboration with the laity is essential,” he said. “However, the responsibility as bishops of this Catholic Church is ours.”

The bishops in Baltimore spent most of Monday in prayer and repentance in an enclosed hotel ballroom that had been converted into a makeshift sanctuary. Most did not leave the hotel where they are staying during the three-day meeting, heeding warnings that there could be throngs of protesters outside.

As it happened, the demonstrations Monday were fairly sparse. But the bishops were confronted inside the hotel with the anguish of two abuse survivors who had been invited to speak to them during the day of prayer.

Luis A. Torres Jr., from New York, told the bishops to have the courage to move ahead “not in three months, not in six months — yesterday.”

“Be the priests you were called to be,” Torres said. “Please act now.”