BOSTON (Reuters) - U.S. Roman Catholics on Thursday said the meetings this week between U.S. cardinals and Vatican officials on the child-abuse scandal did not restore trust in the church leadership and actually made matters worse.
``They needed to begin to restore confidence in the hierarchy, and actually they made matters even worse,'' said Rev. Richard McBrien, professor of theology at Notre Dame University.
While there was confusion and disappointment over a murky, two-track plan for handling pedophile priests, U.S. Catholics were seething at what they saw as arrogant, ignorant and out-of-touch behavior by the cardinals who attended the meetings this week.
``The pope let the bishops off the hook of responsibility for this crisis, and the cardinals left themselves off the hook,'' McBrien, a liberal theologian, said in an interview conducted by electronic mail.
``I'm convinced that the hierarchy has lost its credibility with the great majority of the laity and many, if not most, of the priests and religious. They will not get it back for a long time,'' McBrien said.
Anger focused on the final news conference held on Wednesday evening. Officials kept reporters and viewers waiting for nearly two hours and just three of 12 cardinals, and only one archbishop in charge of a diocese, attended.
As they fielded reporters' questions, the cardinals seemed unprepared and gave sometimes stumbling responses that increased an appearance of aloofness if not arrogance, church
observers said.
``For three of them to show up, only one of whom is a working cardinal, I thought it was an arrogant and disgraceful move,'' said Luise Cahill Dittrich, a member of the Voice of Faithful a group that seeks to promote lay involvement in Church affairs. ``I was embarrassed for them because it was so clear to me that they just don't get it.''
On his return to the United States, Washington Cardinal Theodore McCarrick said he was pleased with the meeting.
``I'm very optimistic we're on the right road now,'' he said on his arrival. ``And I think ... we can guarantee people in the United States that we're in control of things and it will never happen again.''
CRUX OF THE PROBLEM
Dittrich and others said they were infuriated that the cardinals did not address issues of accountability in the Church hierarchy or demands for more involvement by the laity.
``You need to change the structure, and to do that, you have to change who has the power in the church,'' said Linda Pieczynski, spokeswoman for Call to Action, a national group that advocates democratization in the Catholic Church.
``They don't really get the basic issue: People are upset because after the church found out about the abuse, they didn't tell people and made it worse by delivering victims on a silver platter,'' she said.
Some also criticized officials for not taking up the issue of resignations by some of the cardinals.
There have been calls for Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law to resign because court documents show he moved priests from parish to parish even though he knew they were pedophiles.
``Law has lost all his credibility in the Boston archdiocese,'' Dittrich said.
Several church observers said the cardinals may have made restoring trust in the leadership harder by not appearing in public more often and not speaking forcefully when they did.
Dittrich said her group planned to demand that lay Catholic organizations be involved in drafting any policy at the bishops' June meeting in Dallas on pedophile priests.
``From here on in the laity are going to refuse to be an afterthought, Dittrich said. ``The solutions reside with the laity. A failure in June to address and listen to lay people is going to doom whatever policy they come up with and they will not be credible.''
McBrien said U.S. bishops would be hard-pressed to make the meeting in Dallas a success, even though he expected them to produce a strong policy.
``I do think the bishops will adopt a national policy in Dallas in June, but it's not going to look good to the media and the public,'' he said. ``It will resemble the process of making sausage.''
In interviews here today at the center of the crisis a number of priests,
theologians and ordinary Catholics said the Vatican meeting underscored their belief that church leaders still did not understand what to do about priests who abuse minors and bishops who cover up their misdeeds.
"The meeting and the documents produced are not going to heal the wound," said the Rev. Robert Bullock, pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows parish in Sharon, a Boston suburb.
"The statements were equivocal and showed not everybody was in agreement," said Father Bullock, one of the founders of a new group, the Boston Priests Forum, a professional association. "We need to rebuild trust in the church and the priesthood, and I don't think we contributed much to that rebuilding with what happened in Rome."
Like many of those interviewed, Father Bullock said he was most disappointed that the cardinals ignored a central question: what to do about the senior church leaders who transferred the priests accused of sexual abuse from parish to parish.
"What those priests did was tragic," Father Bullock said, "but so was the cover-up by the bishops, and they have to be held accountable."
Lisa Sowle Cahill, a professor of theology at Boston College, a Jesuit-run university that produces many of Boston's business and political leaders, made a similar point.
"To me, it seems the cardinals were still trying to identify the priests as the main source of the problem," Professor Cahill said. "But I think most Catholics are more mad at the episcopal leadership as the source of the problem," she said, referring generally to the Catholic bishops and cardinals.
The statement issued after the meeting by the cardinals "still doesn't address the structural problem that allowed this to go on for so long," the absolute power of the bishops who work in secret, she said. "The bishops still don't admit that they made serious, deliberate errors that were the result of the way they do things."
These criticisms were echoed virtually throughout the city, which has been consumed since January by almost daily revelations of sexual abuse by priests and cover-ups by officials in the Boston Archdiocese. One reason popular opinion seems so one-sided is that the scandal has offended liberals and conservatives alike, with liberals seeing the cause in the church's policy of celibacy and exclusion of women from the priesthood, while conservatives have blamed the church for allowing too many gays to become priests.
Bridget Brennan, 23, a legal assistant getting coffee this
afternoon at a
"I'm especially angry at Cardinal Law because he hasn't served his people," Ms. Brennan said.
"Everyone's saying mistakes have been made, but nobody's saying they've made a mistake," she added. "And as a Catholic, I'm offended by that. As a Catholic, you're taught to go to confession and hold yourself accountable."
As for the meetings in Rome, Ms. Brennan said: "I didn't have high expectations. I thought it was for the media, to create the image that things were moving."
Still, there were a few people who said they thought the meetings were productive. Victor Leon, 53, who owns Foodie's Urban Market across the street from Cardinal Law's home church, the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, said: "I thought they did a good job. Rome wasn't built in a day, so to speak."
"They came up with a skeleton of a plan," Mr. Leon said. "People are expecting immediacy, and it's obviously a deeply rooted problem. It needs breathing room before it can be fully addressed."
On the other hand, Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer who has represented 118 victims of John J. Geoghan, a defrocked priest in prison for molesting a boy, said, "Many of my clients feel extremely dissatisfied with the results of the meeting."
"They feel as though the cardinals, who were part of the problem, are now saying they can fix the problem," Mr. Garabedian said, also noting that the cardinals did not invite any of the victims to participate, which he said is an essential step toward healing and understanding.
"Many victims were hoping something positive would come from the meeting," Mr. Garabedian said. "But they were disappointed, and in a sense, they were revictimized."
At Our Lady Help of Christians church in Newton, the Rev. Walter Cuenin was busy writing a bulletin he will distribute at Mass on Sunday.
"A meeting only of cardinals with the pope perpetuates the kind of church governance that needs to end," Father Cuenin wrote. Instead, he said, the meeting should have included victims and other lay people.