The National Catholic Register has a symposium of leading figures assessing what to expect from next week's Vatican summit on the Church's sex abuse scandal. Robert Royal's analysis strikes me as the most plausible:
For most Americans, Catholic and not, the burning question is how to hold bishops accountable — for what they’ve done themselves or failed to do in disciplining malefactors.
The Holy Father’s last-minute request that the U.S. bishops not vote on concrete measures at their annual November meeting last year was predicated on the idea that the Church should work out a global approach — which early moves by Americans might short-circuit. Now, Vatican spokesmen are telling us that we should lower expectations because this meeting is intended to be more about educating than disciplining.
So it’s not mere cynicism to see the actual record here, whatever the intentions, as blocking proposed action in the name of seeking a consistent approach, then dithering and then redefining what was supposed to be an occasion for concrete proposals leading to action. ...
Recent polls have shown a sharp drop in confidence toward Pope Francis among American Catholics. This is not the result of conservative websites and Twitter feeds, as some in Rome are claiming. Anyway, the debate should not be about interactions in cyberspace, but about what is going to be done in our everyday world about failures of bishops. Defenders of the Pope who do not see the harm delay is causing to his moral witness are doing him no favors.
Perhaps the best thing we may expect to come out of the February meeting is a certain freedom for the various bishops’ conferences around the world to take steps themselves, whether the Vatican is involved or not. Our American bishops had some good ideas about personal conduct and mechanisms for accountability before they were asked not to proceed.
Speaking of "ideas about personal conduct and mechanisms for accountability," I have offered several in a forthcoming law review article Restoring Confidence in the Roman Catholic Church: Corporate Governance Analogies:
Events of the Summer 2018 brought the long running sexual abuse crisis in the Roman Catholic Church back onto the front pages, highlighting the role of diocesan bishops in covering up the scandal and enabling abusers. In response to these developments, the Church is again considering reforms to protect victims and punish abusers and enablers. This article proposes that the Church create a system for laity to anonymously report allegations, enact strong protections for whistleblowers, and impose a mandatory whistleblowing requirement on priests. As a 2018 Pennsylvania grand jury report demonstrates, however, the laity was reporting the abuse to the Church but the hierarchy buried those reports in secret files. The ultimate problem thus is not so much the lack of reporting, as it was the lack of action after the report. Accordingly, the article’s principal proposal is the creation of both diocesan and national disciplinary bodies led by expert lay members as the ultimate authorities in sex abuse cases. The proposal draws an analogy between these bodies and corporate audit committees and argues that a number of aspects of how audit committees function can be usefully adapted to the proposed review bodies.
I offered an updated and shorter version of the basic argument in a opinion column for Public Discourse: Canon Law Should Be Changed to Make Catholic Bishops Accountable, which asserts that:
The Catholic Church in the United States has been rocked by revelations that multiple bishops actively covered up sexual abuse cases. The time has come to take responsibility away from Church tribunals and diocesan bishops, even if that means changing canon law to create mandatory compliance mechanisms like those developed and enforced by for-profit corporations.
Apropos of Royal's hope that the Vatican will leave national conferences a space within which to act, I argued that "National conferences such as the USCCB should be empowered to issue mandatory governance and compliance requirements and to create mechanisms for disciplining prelates who fail to comply."
