{"id":3206,"date":"2007-01-29T08:31:31","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T08:31:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/the-cardinals-sins.html"},"modified":"2007-01-29T08:31:31","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T08:31:31","slug":"the-cardinals-sins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/the-cardinals-sins.html","title":{"rendered":"The Cardinal’s Sins"},"content":{"rendered":"

New York<\/em> magazine runs a long David Gibson piece on Cardinal Egan:<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s a lengthy article, and one which strikes me as balanced. He points out why Egan was brought into New York as the ordinary – to clean up the financial and administrative mess left by Cardinal O’Connor, and except for a few clumsy moments, there are no serious complaints voiced about the process – there’s a grudging acknowledgment that something had to be done. I think Gibson does a good job of communicating Cardinal Egan’s style and difficult relationship with his priests.  He makes some claims about the jockeying for the position of successor to Cardinal O’Connor, and some other snapshots of Archdiocesan life which are sourced anonymously, but such is the case, inevitably, when reporting on Church matters. Hardly anyone wants to go on the record.<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Egan managed to anger both sexual-abuse victims and clergy with his response to the nationwide scandal that erupted in 2002, by far the biggest issue for the Catholic Church on Egan\u2019s watch. Though he has never been publicly accused of wrongdoing in New York, Connecticut newspapers reported in 2002 that as head of the Bridgeport diocese, he\u2019d shifted pedophile clerics around to different parishes and that he repeatedly cast doubt on the allegations of victims. At first, Egan repeatedly insisted he had done nothing wrong. As the criticism mounted, he responded by issuing a carefully worded statement allowing that \u201cif in hindsight we also discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.\u201d<\/p>\n

As similar cases around the country prompted the Church to reform its procedures\u2014or lack thereof\u2014for adjudicating abuse claims, Egan was an obdurate opponent of those early efforts. In 2002, about 290 fellow bishops from around the country designated a blue-ribbon panel of Catholic laypersons, called the National Review Board, to oversee a new system of prevention and transparency. To Egan the board was tantamount to laypersons\u2019 holding authority over a bishop, something he considered to be against Church doctrine. In January 2003, when the board visited New York, Egan refused to say Mass for the group\u2014as other bishops did when the board visited their cities\u2014and made no other bishop available to them.<\/p>\n

A year later, a January 2004 audit by the board\u2019s new Office of Child and Youth Protection gave New York a failing grade on implementing the Church\u2019s new policies. A month later, in the review board\u2019s first comprehensive report on the scandal, the lay group singled out for public rebuke four of the 195 archbishops who head dioceses; Egan was one of them.<\/p>\n

Since then, he has brought the archdiocese into compliance\u2014and then some. The chief worry now among New York\u2019s priests is that, lacking an ally in the archbishop\u2019s chair, they\u2019ll have nowhere to turn if falsely accused.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York magazine runs a long David Gibson piece on Cardinal Egan: It’s a lengthy article, and one which strikes me as balanced. He points out why Egan was brought into New York as the ordinary – to clean up the financial and administrative mess left by Cardinal O’Connor, and except for a few clumsy…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Cardinal's Sins - Via Media<\/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\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/the-cardinals-sins.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Cardinal's Sins - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"New York magazine runs a long David Gibson piece on Cardinal Egan: It’s a lengthy article, and one which strikes me as balanced. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}