Proposed
revisions to a U.S. Roman Catholic Church charter that addresses the
sexual abuse of children by priests are insignificant and fail to
address church cover-ups, critics said on Tuesday.
Members of the Survivors
Network of those Abused by Priests demonstrated outside church offices
in Chicago to protest the draft of the planned revisions to the church's
2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People.
"The changes are paltry, belated and largely insignificant," SNAP Executive Director David Clohessy said.
"Unfortunately,
like almost everything the hierarchy does on abuse, there are no
penalties whatsoever for ignoring or concealing child sex crimes,"
Clohessy said following the protest.
"Bishops continue to try to depict
this crisis as being isolated cases in isolated places, rather than what
it is: a truly widespread, ongoing crisis."
The
bishops' charter, which was revised once before in 2005, was created
when cases of priest abuse emerged in Boston and then around the United
States and the world.
The U.S. church has paid some $2 billion in
settlements, bankrupting a handful of dioceses.
Some
200 bishops gathered on Wednesday in Seattle for a regular meeting where weighed revisions to the charter and other issues.
The revisions would bring the charter into line with the most recent
Vatican instructions, including citing child pornography as a crime
against church law and widening the definition to child abuse to those
with mental disabilities.
A draft
of the charter including the proposed revisions was posted on the
website (www.bishopaccountability.org).
Also posted was a letter from
Springfield, Illinois, Bishop John Paprocki to Spokane Bishop Blase
Cupich, who chairs the bishops' committee on the abuse crisis,
suggesting few changes to church policy were needed.
Most
of the changes in the draft appear minor, including efforts to adhere
to a May 16 Vatican letter to bishops around the world telling them to
make it a priority to root out sexual abuse of children by priests and
to cooperate with police.
SNAP and
other victims' groups have argued that the Vatican must take
responsibility and not give individual bishops the freedom to deal with
cases of priest abuse -- and with any cover-ups that occur.
Church
critics point to a grand jury report in February implicating a
higher-ranking official in the Philadelphia archdiocese in a cover-up of
clergy abuse.
Some 37 priests in active ministry were credibly accused
and four were indicted by the grand jury.
A
study released last month by John Jay College and commissioned by the
U.S. church concluded that incidents of priest sexual abuse were largely
decades old, and rooted in having unprepared priests entering ministry
during an era of loosening societal mores.