From Crux:
During the February summit in Rome, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, one of the summit’s organizing committee members, gave a speech instead outlining “new legal structures of accountability,” which would utilize the metropolitan archbishop who oversees the dioceses within his particular province.
Under the “metropolitan option,” as it has often been referred to, the metropolitan archbishop would be responsible for overseeing the investigation into bishops accused of abuse in conjunction with a local review board, unless there were compelling reasons to hand the case over either to the pope’s nuncio, or ambassador, in the country, or to the Vatican itself.
At a press conference during the Vatican summit, Cupich said his proposal was different from the original USCCB plan as it would become obligatory, whereas the original proposal gave bishops the ability to opt into it. He also said the proposal would give the plan a more local character necessary to follow up and communicate with victims.
DiNardo told Crux at the time that looking ahead to plans to vote on new measures, that “we have to tweak some things” regarding the original protocols and hinted that the final proposal he hoped to be put to a vote in June will likely “put the two together,” referring to the metropolitan model.
The metropolitan model is seriously flawed, for reasons I discussed in my Public Discourse article Lay Review With Teeth: What (Didn’t) Happen at the Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit:
Cardinal Cupich’s ... proposals are limited to developing new mechanisms for holding bishops accountable. This is a necessary but not sufficient reform. Instead, the Church should undertake major reforms of the rules governing sexual misconduct at all levels and by all Church personnel. ...
Cupich’s model has a number of disadvantages. First, in modern times, the role of a metropolitan has been reduced to a virtual irrelevancy. Many Church members have never even heard of a metropolitan. The metropolitan model therefore may not do much to restore confidence in the Church.
Second, although the metropolitan model purportedly contemplates lay participation, it appears that the laity’s role would be limited to experts who will act as assistants to the metropolitan. In other words, the laity will continue to be denied a decision-making role in the accountability process. Cardinal Cupich’s proposal leaves decision-making power in the hands of those authorities that Church members trust least: the bishops and the Vatican hierarchy.
Assigning primary responsibility for investigated claims against a bishop to that bishop’s metropolitan is especially problematic, as Charles Collins of the Catholic news website Crux has observed, because “metropolitan archbishops often have a lot of say in who becomes bishops in their province.” Church members likely will lack confidence in the metropolitan’s ability to be objective with respect to someone who may be regarded as a protégé, friend, or ally of the metropolitan.
The relationship between a metropolitan and his suffragan bishops becomes even more problematic when it is the metropolitan himself who is the accused.
Kindly go read the whole thing. See also my article Restoring Confidence in the Roman Catholic Church: Corporate Governance Analogies, which is available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3249236. Here's the abstract:
Abstract. 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.
This version of the article has been revised to take into account developments at the February 2019 Vatican summit on the sex abuse scandal. Those developments do not change the recommendations made herein.
At the core of the sex abuse scandal is abuse of clerical and episcopal power. The voice of the laity must be heard. Concerned Catholics need to reach out to their bishops and implore them adopt meaningful reforms rather than a misbegotten metropolitan model that won't work, won't inspire confidence, and won't stop people from leaving the Church.
