Amid mounting criticism over the results of the Vatican meeting this week on sex abuse by priests, the head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said Thursday that top American church officials remain deeply divided over whether they should end the career of any priest accused of abusing a child years before.
In an interview as he flew back to the United States after a two-day meeting of Vatican officials and American cardinals, Bishop Wilton Gregory said the recommendations they produced reflected an attempt to make the care and consideration for victims the highest priority while protecting an accused priest’s right to due process.
Gregory, of Belleville, Ill., said he expects that, when U.S. bishops meet in June, they will endorse a zero-tolerance policy for all cases of priests who abuse minors from now on. But he said there is division among the bishops about whether it is always right to remove from ministry priests facing old accusations.
The question about whether to act on old cases is crucial because the vast majority of child abuse victims wait many years before they talk about what happened.
“The simplest response would be, there is no difference” between the old and new cases, Gregory said. “However, I may find out about an incident that occurred 35 years ago, and the perpetrator has been as far as we know absolutely faithful in his service since then. You can understand the dilemma.”
Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, spokesman for the bishops conference, said in an interview on the plane that, in the cardinals’ joint statement issued Wednesday, the distinctions between “notorious” and other priestly abusers were made only because they refer to the code of canon law, the laws of the Roman Catholic Church.
At their meeting in Rome, the cardinals won agreement from the Vatican to amend the code of canon law to make it easier for a bishop to have a priest defrocked against his will.
Gregory said he favors zero tolerance for all priest abusers, new and old, whether they have molested many children or one.
Since the sex abuse scandal broke in January, and before that, many bishops removed from ministry priests facing old allegations. But Gregory said many bishops struggle with this because there are often mitigating circumstances.
A common scenario is that someone comes forward wanting an apology but does not want his or her name made public.
“You can’t just . . . announce to the parish, this man you’ve respected for the last 20 years is a molester, or you revictimize the parish,” Gregory said. “You can’t reveal the victim. . . . And you have to do it in a way so that the priest . . . doesn’t despair” and harm himself or others.
Gregory left open the possibility that his fellow bishops will decide they must take action against the priests who have victimized someone years ago.
“We’re not trying to avoid doing the right thing. We’re trying to do the right thing in the right way,” he said.
Meanwhile, the National Organization for Women called for Chicago Cardinal Francis George to resign over comments he made in which he differentiated between priests who are serial pedophiles and those who engage in sexual activity with a teenage girl on one occasion.
“There’s a difference between a moral monster . . . who preys on little children and does so in a serial fashion and someone who, perhaps under the influence of alcohol, engages in an action with a 17- or 16-year-old young woman who returns his affections,” George had said Tuesday in Vatican City.
“What he has said is an indication that he takes the sexual abuse of young girls less seriously than the sexual abuse of young boys,” Catherine Caporusso Hartman, vice president of Chicago NOW, told WLS-Ch. 7. “It merits his resignation.”
George said he believes sexual abuse of any child is a crime.