Vatican asks U.S. bishops not to vote on their proposals to tackle sexual abuse

In the opening minutes of their meeting, the bishops heard a surprising report: Pope Francis had asked them not to vote on any of their proposals.

The pope does not want U.S. bishops to act to address bishops’ accountability on badual abuse until he leads a worldwide meeting of church leaders in February, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, told the gathered bishops as the meeting opened Monday morning.

“At the insistence of the Holy See, we will not be voting on the two action items,” DiNardo said. He said he was “disappointed” by the pope’s directive.

Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of BishopAccountability.org, called the last-minute order from the Vatican “truly incredible.”

“What we see here is the Vatican again trying to suppress even modest progress by the U.S. bishops,” said Doyle, whose group compiles data on clergy abuse in the church. “We’re seeing where the problem lies, which is with the Vatican. The outcome of this meeting, at best, was going to be tepid and ineffectual, but now it’s actually going to be completely without substance.”

As soon as the bishops heard DiNardo’s announcement, Archbishop Christophe Pierre — the Vatican’s ambbadador to the United States — gave a lengthy address, in which he defended what the bishops have already done to reduce instances of clergy abusing children and expressed hesitation about anyone other than clergy, like lay leaders or civil authorities, punishing clergy abuse.

“There are many calls for reform in the church, particularly among the present crisis. You yourselves have expressed a greater desire for accountability and transparency,” he said. But then Pierre, a French bishop sent by Francis to Washington in 2016, quoted a French author who said that “whoever pretends to reform the church with the same means to reform temporal society” will “fail.”

“There may be a temptation on the part of some to relinquish responsibility for reform to others from ourselves, as if we were no longer capable of reforming or trusting ourselves,” said Pierre, who seemed to refer obliquely to both the bishops’ now-tabled proposal to establish a lay commission capable of investigating bishops’ misconduct, and also the more than dozen U.S. states’ ongoing criminal and civil investigations into crimes committed by priests. “Assistance is both welcome and necessary, and surely collaboration with the laity is essential. However, the responsibility as bishops of this Catholic Church is ours.”

DiNardo followed Pierre’s address, with a different tone. He said that he and other U.S. bishops remain committed to the proposals they had planned to vote on Wednesday, including a new code of conduct that bishops must adhere to and a lay commission empowered to investigate bishops.

“Brother bishops, to exempt ourselves from this high standard of accountability is unacceptable and cannot stand,” DiNardo said. “Whether we will be regarded as guardians of the abused or the abuser will be determined by our actions.”

Then the bishops adjourned for their planned day of prayer — which was supposed to precede two days of debate and voting on concrete proposals — leaving stunned abuse survivors and church insiders to discuss what had just happened.

The only bishop who spoke during the morning’s brief session after the announcement was Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, who proposed an alternative to the Vatican’s request that no vote be taken on any of the planned proposals. Cupich suggested a nonbinding vote at this session, followed by an additional meeting of all the bishops in March — after Francis’s worldwide meeting — to formally vote in these policies as soon as possible.

Becky Ianni, the D.C. regional head for SNAP — the most established survivor advocacy group — said that she was frustrated by the surprise announcement. “To me, this is not rocket science. Someone covers up abuse of a child, they’re gone. Seems very simple to me,” she said. “We’re dealing [in the U.S.] with the crisis, right here, right now. Yes, it’s a global problem, and they need to discuss it there, but the U.S. needs to come up with something right now.”