{"id":68,"date":"2008-04-17T09:10:38","date_gmt":"2008-04-17T09:10:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/pope-gets-thumbs-up-cardinal-g.html"},"modified":"2008-04-17T09:10:38","modified_gmt":"2008-04-17T09:10:38","slug":"pope-gets-thumbs-up-cardinal-g","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/pope-gets-thumbs-up-cardinal-g.html","title":{"rendered":"Pope Benedict gets thumbs up, Cardinal George thumbs down, from former head of Lay Review Panel"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a post yesterday on the roots of Benedict’s “conversion”<\/a> on the issue of sexual abuse by priests–and the enabling behavior of many bishops–I recounted the story of Anne Burke, a widely-respected Illinois jurist and former head of the National Review Board of prominent lay Catholics charged with holding the bishops to their word in implementing policies to remove abusers and prevent future cases. Burke and two other board member met with then-Cardinal ratzinger in the Vatican in January 2004 to tell him the real story of the crisis which she said was not being communicated by the bishops to Rome. Ratzinger listened, and followed up. “We named names,” Burke said.
\nI was interested in Burke’s reaction to the pope’s words to the bishops last night, in which he noted that some of them had “badly handled” the cases–the first public acknowledgment that the bishops themselves contributed to the scandal.
\nBurke called this morning and her verdict was unequivocal: “I can’t tell you how delighted I was to read what he said,” Burke said. “I think something directly from him was very important.” And she, said it was important that it was done publicly–there were reports that the American bishops wanted to keep last night’s meeting with the bishops closed to media, as they were anticipating that Benedict’s message might have some teeth, on the abuse issue as well as other topics. But the Vatican–reportedly–asked that it be televised. “He had to do that,” Burke said of the public comments. “He”–the pope–“knows,” she said of the bishops’ track record. And now, “He let them know that he knows.” Based on her past meeting with Cardinal Ratzinger, she said, “I knew in my heart of hearts he was going to do something like this.”
\nBurke has been a forceful voice for greater accountability for bishops, something that has not exactly made her a darling of the hierarchy. She would like to see more done, but thinks Benedict’s statements were the crucial signal.
\nWhat disturbed Burke about last night’s talk at a vespers service at the National Shrine was that he was welcomed by the president of the national bishops conference, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, who Burke–and many others–considers a scofflaw when it comes to the very policies that George helped implement. Her frustration focuses in particular on the case of a priest, Father Daniel McCormack<\/a>, a Chicago priest who was accused of molesting children but was not removed from ministry in 2005 despite requests from George’s own lay advisory board to do so.<\/p>\n


\nMcCormack subsequently abused other boys. He was arrested Jan. 20, 2006 and in March 2006 Cardinal George publicly apologized for not removing him and for intially indicating he did not know about the case. Yet he faced no sanctions–there are none for bishops who violate the policy known as the charter–and victims, their relatives, and lay leaders like Burke are furious. She is especially angry that George was subsequently elected as leader of the U.S. hierarchy.
\n(Daniel McCormack eventually pleaded guilty to abusing five boys. He is serving a five-year sentence in prison.)
\n“It’s outrageous, actually, that he is president of the national bishops confernece,” Burke told me. “”McCormack is a recent case, and Cardinal George did not follow what the bishops said they were going to do.” Burke said that in her January 2004 meeting with then-Cardinal Ratzinger “we told him a lot about George,” so Benedict knew George’s track record when he delivered his remarks last night. “We knew that Cardinal George was disingenuous with us on many occassions. He showed he can’t be trusted.”
\nBut, she insisted, the scandal and her anger are “not about faith. People keep getting that mixed up. It’s just bad administration.” She will be encouraged if Benedict continues to appoint bishops who are better administrators, above all on this issue. The statement by some church leaders that the scandal “is history” is not her takeaway. “It’s not history.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a post yesterday on the roots of Benedict’s “conversion” on the issue of sexual abuse by priests–and the enabling behavior of many bishops–I recounted the story of Anne Burke, a widely-respected Illinois jurist and former head of the National Review Board of prominent lay Catholics charged with holding the bishops to their word in…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nPope Benedict gets thumbs up, Cardinal George thumbs down, from former head of Lay Review Panel - Benedictions: The Pope in America<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/2008\/04\/pope-gets-thumbs-up-cardinal-g.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Pope Benedict gets thumbs up, Cardinal George thumbs down, from former head of Lay Review Panel - 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/benedictions\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}