The Vatican has told the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to delay voting on measures to hold bishops accountable for failing to protect children from sexual abuse, the president of the conference said in a surprise announcement Monday morning.
In his announcement, Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said he was “disappointed” by the Vatican’s decision, which he said he learned of on Sunday afternoon. Pope Francis met with his ambassador to the United States, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, on Saturday, according to the pope’s public schedule.
Pierre is in Baltimore and addressed the body of bishops on Monday morning, though he did not mention the Vatican’s insistence that the US bishops delay their vote. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops gathers about 200 bishops from around the country twice a year to debate and adopt new policies.
A Vatican spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pope Francis will convene a meeting of bishops from around the world in February to address the sexual abuse crisis, which has roiled the church on several continents, including North America, South America and Australia.
The Catholic bishops had been expected to debate and vote on several “concrete measures to respond to the abuse crisis,” according to a news release about the meeting in Baltimore.
Those measures, according to the bishops’ conference, included a hotline to report bishops accused of abuse or mishandling abuse cases, standards of conduct for bishops and “protocols for bishops resigned or removed because of abuse.”
The bishops can still debate those measures, but they will not vote on them this week, following the Vatican’s intervention.
US Catholic bishops announce new policies to police bishops
Catholic bishops in the United States have been heavily criticized for failing to hold themselves accountable for the sexual abuse of children, especially after a grand jury report in Pennsylvania released this summer found widespread evidence of abuse by priests and coverups by bishops. Under church law, only the Pope can discipline bishops.
In another scandal, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, DC, and a powerful figure in the church, was demoted by Pope Francis after a man accused McCarrick of molesting him decades ago in New York. Since then, other men have come forward in media reports accusing McCarrick of molesting them while they were seminarians. McCarrick has denied the accusation from New York and is appealing his case at the Vatican.
A number of Catholic bishops have said they are concerned that McCarrick was allowed to rise through the church’s ranks despite persistent rumors about his conduct. DiNardo and others traveled to Rome this fall to personally ask the Pope for the Vatican’s help in investigating McCarrick.
Immediately after DiNardo made the surprise announcement on Monday, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, one of the Pope’s closest allies in the United States, said the bishops should still discuss the proposals, even if they are not voted on this week.
Cupich also suggested that the bishops could vote on the new measures at an emergency meeting in March.
“We need as a conference, as brother bishops, to take up this issue for the good of the church in this country without delay,” Cupich said.