By Jerry Filteau
Catholic news service

Washington — Clergy sexual abuse of minors dominated discussions at the annual fall meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops Nov. 11-14 in Washington.

Five months after approving the “Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People” in Dallas, the bishops revised it and approved tightened-up legal norms designed to bind all U.S. bishops to implementation of that charter and to pass muster with Vatican officials.

And they opened discussions of a possible plenary council in the future to deal with deeper church issues behind the scandal.

They also adopted a statement apologizing for their own role in the scandal and setting a new reporting standard for bishops who engage in sexual misconduct.

Cardinal George, who had asked for such a statement at the June bishops’ meeting in Dallas, said it is a first step in terms of accountability for bishops.

“We’ve never had anything like this that calls on bishops to exercise oversight over their brother bishops,” the cardinal said, noting that it extends to issues beyond the clergy sex abuse crisis.

The resolution, approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops at their meeting in Washington Nov. 13, does not allow the bishops to impose any penalties on one other, he said, because canon law does not give bishops that authority. But it asks them to engage in “fraternal correction” as well as support, he said.

The bishops will have to work within that framework for a time before deciding how to proceed, he said, because they need to figure out how it will work.

When it comes to the sex abuse scandal, Cardinal George said that the rules of the newly revised and approved charter and norms apply to any bishops as well as priests who have abused children, and that the national lay review board will make sure that all bishops enforce the charter and norms.

At the meeting, the bishops delayed a vote on a statement about their own accountability in order to incorporate language apologizing for “our mistakes in the past when some bishops have transferred, from one assignment to another, priests who had abused minors.”

The statement pledged ongoing efforts by the bishops at the level of U.S. church provinces—geographic groups of dioceses under an archdiocese—to keep one another accountable for preventing clergy sexual abuse. It said that if any bishop faces an accusation of abusing a minor or a financial demand related to any form of alleged sexual misconduct he must report it the metropolitan archbishop or the senior bishop of the province.

The bishops also were introduced to the 13 members of the National Review Board on sexual abuse—established at their June meeting and chaired by Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating—as well as the new executive director of their national Office for Child and Youth Protection, Kathleen L. McChesney, who is leaving a top FBI position to take up the new church post.

The National Review Board held its fifth meeting Nov. 11, in conjunction with the bishops’ meeting, and issued an updated report on its work.

The bishops approved plans to budget some $3 million over the next three years for the work of the national board and child protection office, research on clergy sex abuse and other USCCB child protection activities.

The four-day national gathering of more than 250 bishops provided an occasion for groups like Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, LinkUp, Soulforce, Rainbow Sash, FutureChurch and Voice of the Faithful to converge on Washington and voice their views on clergy sex abuse and a variety of church issues that are sometimes linked to the abuse problem.

Bishop Wilton D. Gregory of Belleville, Ill., USCCB president for former Chicago auxiliary bishop, said in his opening address that the unity of the church has been threatened by “the criminal and sinful sexual abuse of children and the mismanagement of those violations by some church leaders.”

“We will not step back from our compassion for those who have been harmed or from our determination to put into place policies that will protect children,” he said.

At a final press conference Nov. 13, he said the church is “in a much better place” today than it was when the scandal erupted last January.

But after returning to Chicago, Cardinal George said he is concerned that so many lay Catholics and members of the public remain misinformed about the situation and seem to think the church is still protecting priests from criminal and civil prosecution.

In 98 to 99 percent of the cases that have been turned up in the past year, civil law and criminal law can do nothing because of the statute of limitations or other issues.

“A lot of people still think the church has hidden a whole passel of criminals. They are uninformed,” the cardinal said. “These are cases where the civil authorities have reviewed them and said, ‘We can’t do anything. You handle it.’ This is way to move them toward final resolution.”

Several bishops at press briefings emphasized that administrative or judicial proceedings the church undertakes against offending clerics do not replace or interfere with any possible criminal proceedings in civil courts.

They stressed that the norms still require church authorities to cooperate to obey civil reporting laws and cooperate with civil authorities investigating allegations of sexual abuse of a minor by a cleric.

The revised version of the charter retains its language requiring church authorities to report to public authorities whenever they receive “an allegation of sexual abuse of a person who is (still) a minor,” even if local civil law does not make church authorities mandatory reporters of child abuse.

In a homily at their annual concelebrated Mass at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, Wash., USCCB vice president, referred to “these difficult days in our beloved church” and urged the bishops to “never give in to discouragement ... even when we fall.”

The revised norms, adopted Nov.13 by a vote of 246-7, call for a prompt investigation of any allegation that a priest or deacon has abused a minor. If there is sufficient evidence that the allegation is true, the bishop is to notify the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and take the necessary steps to remove the alleged offender from ministry.

Revision of the norms by a mixed commission of four U.S. and four Vatican bishops just two weeks before the bishops’ meeting had provoked wide speculation that the Vatican concern to protect due process rights of accused priests would undercut the bishops’ decision last June in Dallas to remove permanently from ministry any priest who has sexually abused even one minor.

Instead, the revisions pointedly affirmed the bishop’s obligation and authority “at all times ... to ensure that any priest who has committed even one act of sexual abuse of a minor ... shall not continue in active ministry.”

Cardinal George, senior prelate on the U.S. side of the mixed commission, led the bishops’ debate over the revised norms. He said that when the bishops first adopted them last June in Dallas they focused only on administrative acts by which a bishop could remove a man from ministry if he sexually abused a minor.

The Vatican-initiated revisions addressed the role of the church’s courts in imposing a permanent removal from ministry or even dismissal from the clerical state, he said.

In their revised form the norms offer the possibility of lifting the statute of limitations, on a case-by-case basis, for those sexual abuse crimes by clerics that would otherwise be too old to prosecute in a church court. Cardinal George expressed the belief that a large majority of existing cases fall into that category. For many years the church’s statute of limitations for prosecuting clerical sex crimes against minors was three years after the crime was committed; recently the Vatican extended that to 10 years after the victim turns 18.

It will likely take some months to set up the canon law tribunals necessary to provide trials for accused clerics—one of the major requirements of the revised norms Cardinal George and three other bishops worked out with four bishops from the Vatican. The U.S. bishops approved the revisions Nov. 13.

Under canon law, priests are entitled to a trial if a permanent penalty is to be imposed, he said.

“What we’re interested in is fairness, to the accused priest and to the victim,” he said.

Cardinal George was speaking to reporters following a memorial Mass for Cardinal Joseph Bernardin and the 23 Archdiocese of Chicago priests who died in the last year.

Publication of the revised norms and charter was delayed until after the meeting in order to meet a demand by bishops of the Eastern Catholic churches that the final versions incorporate, alongside references to the canon law code of the Latin Church, corresponding references to the general law of the Eastern churches. Ukrainian Archbishop Stefan Soroka of Philadelphia said the lack of Eastern law references made it look like the U.S. church was breathing with only “one lung”—a pointed reference to the metaphor of the East and West as the two lungs of the one church.

A national study released the day before the bishops met reported a significant drop-off in contributions by church-going Catholics because of the clergy sex abuse crisis and a lack of trust in the way the bishops have handled it.

Bishop Gregory said at the meeting’s final press conference that a restoration of trust “will only be possible when we are open in our stewardship.”

Editor’s Note: The revised norms are posted on the USCCB Web site at: www.usccb.org/bishops/normsrevised.htm; the revised charter is at: www.usccb.org/bishops/charter2.htm.

Contributing to this story were Agostino Bono, Nancy Frazier O’Brien, Mark Pattison and Patricia Zapor in Washington D.C. and Michelle Martin in Chicago.