{"id":339,"date":"2011-04-12T15:55:20","date_gmt":"2011-04-12T19:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/?p=339"},"modified":"2011-04-12T15:55:20","modified_gmt":"2011-04-12T19:55:20","slug":"on-the-accountability-of-bishops","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/on-the-accountability-of-bishops.html","title":{"rendered":"On the accountability of bishops"},"content":{"rendered":"

To read Bill Donohue’s latest defense<\/a> of the virtue of the Catholic powers-that-be–published as a full-page ad in yesterday’s New York Times–<\/em>is to be struck by the degree to which he and his episcopal buddies refuse even to discuss the issue that lies at the core of the sex abuse scandal over the past decade. From the intemperate remarks<\/a> of New Hampshire legislators about Bishop John McCormack’s past to the prosecution<\/a> of Cardinal Justin Rigali’s regime in Philadelphia to the implosion<\/a> of the Church’s moral authority in Ireland, it has been the refusal of the Church to hold bishops accountable for anything other than their own private sins<\/a> that continues to outrage Catholics and non-Catholics alike.<\/p>\n

Let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that the dioceses have accurately reported<\/a> the numbers of abuse cases contained in the latest report<\/a> of the USCCB’s Review Board: 426 credible cases, with only seven having occurred in 2010. Let us further stipulate that the policies adopted by the bishops have succeeded in reducing the amount of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy. Unless and until the accountability of bishops is addressed, it won’t matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To read Bill Donohue’s latest defense of the virtue of the Catholic powers-that-be–published as a full-page ad in yesterday’s New York Times–is to be struck by the degree to which he and his episcopal buddies refuse even to discuss the issue that lies at the core of the sex abuse scandal over the past decade.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-catholic-bishops"],"yoast_head":"\nOn the accountability of bishops - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/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\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/04\/on-the-accountability-of-bishops.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"On the accountability of bishops - 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":341,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339\/revisions\/341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}