Bishops to Revise Clergy Sex Abuse Charter

WASHINGTON — When the U.S. bishops meet in June, they will work to revise their "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People" and the "Essential Norms" implementing the charter legislatively.

They will also be asked to approve spending up to $1 million from their reserve funds to fund a major study into the causes and context behind the decades of clergy sexual abuse of minors that exploded into a major church crisis in 2002.

The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops meets June 16-18 in Chicago.

The documents the bishops will be asked to revise and renew were originally adopted in 2002 with a projected two-year life span before review. That life span was extended when the bishops were not able to conduct the revisions at their November 2004 meeting.

Proposed revisions in the "Essential Norms" are few and limited in scope.

Several of the revisions in the norms simply reflect more precision in legal terminology, such as inserting "canonical" before "due process" at one point and, at another point, inserting a note that an accused cleric "enjoys the presumption of innocence" during the investigation of the allegation.

The section on the applicability of the norms to clerics in religious orders was rewritten, with appropriate canon law references added, to state more clearly the autonomy of religious orders over the internal life of their community, while respecting the bishop's authority to prohibit someone from engaging in any act of public ministry in his diocese.

The charter has been rewritten extensively to reflect the fact that its provisions have now been in place since June 2002. The main work of dioceses now is continuing implementation — not establishing new policies, programs, offices and other structures to meet charter requirements initially, as many dioceses had to do when it was first adopted.

Originally approved in June 2002, with some revisions the following November, the charter contained 17 articles spelling out specific projects, policies, programs and structures that the bishops would set up nationally and in their dioceses. These included:

— Removing from ministry any priests and deacons who have sexually abused minors.

— Reaching out to victims and their families pastorally and in other ways.

— Notifying civil authorities when church personnel are accused of molesting minors.

— Establishing sexual abuse awareness and safe environment programs and policies throughout dioceses, parishes and schools, including background checks on priests, other church personnel and volunteers who work with children.

— Forming diocesan review boards to review cases independently and hire victim outreach coordinators.

— Creating a National Review Board and an Office of Child and Youth Protection, with responsibility for monitoring dioceses for compliance with the charter and reporting the findings annually.

— Conducting two major national studies on clergy sexual abuse of minors, one on its nature and scope and the other on its causes and context.

Throughout the proposed charter revision the bishops will consider in June, the future verbs of the original charter are changed to the present tense because the charter is already operational. For example, "will have" becomes "is to have."

The revised preamble to the charter reflects what the bishops have done since 2002 to implement its policies and procedures.

On one of the most debated substantive issues, the proposed revision remains firm: "For even a single act of sexual abuse of a minor ... the offending priest or deacon is to be permanently removed from ministry and, if warranted, dismissed from the clerical state."

The original charter described some of the legal processes that would be followed when an allegation is made against a cleric. The proposed revision deletes those because they are repetitive: The same legal processes are spelled out in the complementary legislative document, "Essential Norms."

In light of nearly three years of experience, the revision spells out in more detail the responsibilities of the bishops' Office of Child and Youth Protection and the National Review Board, and the relationship between the two entities is strengthened.

One substantive change in the revision is upgrading the bishops' Ad Hoc Committee on Sexual Abuse to a standing committee, renamed the Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People. The collaborative relationship of the national office and review board with the committee is spelled out more clearly.

At several points language is changed to state more clearly and comprehensively who is to be given background checks. Language is added to clarify that even when a retired priest who has abused a minor transfers his residence to a different diocese the bishop of that diocese is to be notified and provided with relevant details.

The proposed commitment of up to $1 million for the sexual abuse "causes and context" study, which by preliminary estimates is likely to cost about $2 million to $4 million, is intended to demonstrate to foundations and other possible donors the commitment of the bishops to the study.

The review board set the stage for that study between 2002 and 2004 by interviewing scores of people, from law enforcement officials to child abuse experts, from theologians to psychologists, from bishops to victims and priests who had molested children. From those interviews and its own discussions it drew up a 150-page preliminary report on the causes and context of the crisis, which academic teams are using as a basis for proposing how the in-depth academic study should be conducted.

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