Temporarily Wrapping Up Commenting On The Clergy Sex Abuse Meeting That Ended Yesterday

I was thinking of taking a week or two off before talking about the extraordinary meeting of bishops and others that Pope Francis called to deal, decisively, with the scandal of child sex abuse and cover-up in the Catholic Church because, as with all of these kinds of meetings, the follow-up will either make or break it.  I'm not a huge Vatican watcher so I don't know how seriously to take the various takes on the meeting, those who criticize it as inadequate, those who have worse to say about it, those who have declared it a step forward,  that will all come out in results.

One thing to watch is a specific case, that of Bishop Richard Malone, now of Buffalo, New York who has been very credibly accused of being negligent in cases of priests under his supervision when they molested children.   I'm familiar with Richard Malone because he was the worst bishop of the Diocese of  Portland, Maine in its history.   Considering his competition for that title includes the putrid and dishonest Cardinal William Henry O'Connell, that shows you how bad he was. If he remains in office, don't hold your breath for the rest of the promised changes.  I'm not alone in saying something like that:

If it seems clear the presidents of the world's bishops' conferences got the message, it is less clear to me that the heads of the Roman dicasteries did. It is imperative that the four congregations charged by Francis' apostolic letter "Like a Loving Mother" with holding bishops accountable for negligence about protecting minors publish the protocols and procedures by which that accountability will be exercised.

It is almost two years since "Like a Loving Mother" was published and still no one knows: Have any bishops been brought to justice under the terms of that document? By what policies and protocols? Have new canons been recommended so that the procedures and protocols are clearly known? Has a case been opened against, for example, Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo, New York, about whom there have been credible allegations of negligence? If not, why not? What role do nuncios play in this process? This will be the first test of this meeting's success going forward: Will the curial congregations publish their policies or protocols and disclose the cases they are currently handling? Francis: If you are reading this, every Saturday when you meet with Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops, ask for those protocols and don't stop until you get them.

I think that unless Catholic lay people and Women religious are given real power equal to that which the bishops now have, including within the relevant Vatican departments, you can also fairly doubt that anything will really change. I disagree with Michael Sean Winters on trusting the bishops to end the crimes and scandal by themselves.   And I don't mean lay people under the patronage of things like those disgusting knightly orders, crypto-fascist fraternal organizations and their ladies auxiliaries, and reactionaries and wealthy donors to the church.  I mean the very kind of outsiders who have honestly devoted themselves to changing the church to end the corruption and expose the crimes from the disastrous times of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.   The majority of bishops and many of those still in the Vatican were part of the establishment during that time, they haven't seemed to have gotten it most of that time or been brave enough to tell those two disastrously bad pastors the truth.   It wouldn't have made a difference to John Paul II, who had a lot in common with the dictatorial, power hungry O'Connell mentioned above.  They may have lost worldly office but they'd have gained their souls.