Baptist leader stands by 'Christian love' for Weiner
We''ll find out Thursday if the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will make any significant revisions to the rules set in 2002 for rooting out priests who abused young people and preventing new abuses.
At their annual spring meeting, the indications were, as Daniel Burke of Religion News Service points out, they would simply update the policy with minor tweaks. Yet the discussion at the meeting, in Bellevue, Wash, included one startling comment.
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RNS quotes the retired Archbishop of Anchorage Francis Hurley saying a "goal" of reconciliation should be to put priest abusers back in ministry and asking, "Don't we believe in forgiveness?"
Whispers in the Loggia poster Rocco Palmo, posting/tweeting in Bellevue expected that "conflating said forgiveness with restoration to ministry...." would be the take-away quote of the day.
Palmo's Tuesday Whispers post gave a summary of exactly why folks are hopped up about the 2002 rules, known as the Dallas Charter and why victims groups say small changes are insufficient:
The changes proposed by the bishops, who proclaimed themselves by and large pleased with the Charter so far, are minor ones to bring it into accord with the current Vatican guidelines.
This is all still a far cry from what the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) and BishopAccountability.org have been seeking for the last decade.
SNAP's press release calls for...
...harsh penalties for any church employee from custodian to cardinal who ignore or conceals child sex crimes. There are no such provisions now, and virtually never, SNAP claims, are those who "enable" child molesting clerics ever punished for their misdeeds.
Bishop-Accountability.org, working from a draft version of the bishop's proposals, called for several changes in a press release including:
Forgiveness... well, not mentioned very often, is it?
Is there a lesson in Prison Fellowship, the Charles Colson group bringing an evangelical message to locked-up criminals? Their premise is that forgiveness is between a person and God, a separate issue from legal and due punishment for crimes against other people.
DO YOU THINK... Catholic bishops can counsel victims to forgive abusers for the sake of the abusers' "reconciliation" and return to ministry?
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