United States Catholic bishops will convene for a national meeting in Baltimore on Tuesday, a month after Pope Francis issued new church law requiring, among other things, that priests and nuns around the world report clergy sexual abuse and cover-ups by their superiors to church authorities.
Assumption College president Francesco Cesareo, who chairs a national review board set up to advise the bishops on the church sex abuse crisis, will be addressing the conference.
Cesareo said that after the last conference was cut short by the Vatican in November, the U.S. bishops “sense the urgency of doing something,” and that, when it comes to allegations against bishops themselves, the review board believes lay experts must be a part of any investigation.
“The laity, the faithful, are really looking for something very concrete to come out of this meeting,” Cesareo told WGBH News. “So this is very, very important to demonstrate to the laity a new pathway and a new commitment to transparency and accountability — particularly accountability of bishops. So I think this is a very critical meeting. And if there was no action that was concrete after this meeting, I think it would be very detrimental to the life of the church.”
Cesareo said he thinks the bishops take the review board's recommendations seriously, “but, at the end of the day, they are not obliged or compelled to take those recommendations.”
Read more: Pope Mandates Reporting Of Sex Abuse To Church, Not Police
Boston Archbishop Sean O’Malley, who leads the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, could be influential at the meeting, said Cesareo.
“I think he's been very forceful in the need for bishops to be held accountable,” Cesareo said. ”I think his voice does carry a certain weight among the body of bishops because of his role. And so hopefully that will be decisive in the direction in which the discussion goes. But you just never know when you have an entire body of bishops coming together on these topics.”
Cesareo said Francis’ new law sets out a timeline for Episcopal conferences throughout the world to have implantation plans for the new requirements on sexual abuse ready within a year.
“We hope that … given the desire of the laity to see some real concrete action that displays a sense of recognition that they can't do this on their own, that they need to engage laity, that they need the laity to be co-responsible for the well-being of the church with them, may perhaps move this in the direction that we hope it will go in,” Cesareo said.
