https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...se/582658/

Article on a Catholic bishop who has been the leader on trying to reform the Catholic Church on issues of sexual abuse and his difficulties in getting change through the bureaucracy. My reaction to these things is that the church is more concerned about its reputation than its parishioners.

"A few years after seán o’malley took over the Archdiocese of Boston in 2003, at the peak of the clergy sexual-abuse crisis in America, he led novenas of penance at nine of the city’s most affected parishes. At each church he visited, he lay facedown on the floor before the altar, begging for forgiveness. This is how O’Malley has spent his life in ministry: cleaning up after pedophile priests and their apologists, and serving as the Catholic Church’s public face of repentance and reform....


Perhaps the most pressing problem for the Church is how it deals with failures at the very top—and in other countries where abuse cases are only now beginning to surface. “The lacuna in the Charter is around accountability of bishops,” O’Malley said. This is the first in a long list of problems that have bedeviled Church leaders and exacerbated mistrust among survivors and parishioners. Bishops, whose leadership role in the Church is supposedly modeled after Jesus’s apostles, often serve as the highest-ranking Catholic officials located in a given area. But even senior clergy have little ability to exercise control over one another. Currently, there is no formal mechanism in place for punishing or removing one of the thousands of Catholic bishops across the world when he is accused of wrongdoing, short of the intervention of the pope....

<and the article also describes how reluctant the Vatican is to get involved in local issues>

The dysfunction in how sexual-abuse issues are handled within the U.S. is multiplied at the global level, even on seemingly simple questions. In 2014, Pope Francis put O’Malley in charge of the newly formed Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors—a special Vatican group dedicated to developing sexual-abuse-related reforms. One of the group’s recommendations was simple: If any Vatican office receives a letter from a survivor, that letter must be acknowledged. Even though the pope approved this measure, at least one Vatican department, the influential Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, apparently declined to cooperate, arguing that local priests were better suited to address victims’ concerns. In 2017, the prominent sexual-abuse survivor and advocate Marie Collins resigned from the commission in protest. “I find it impossible to listen to public statements about the deep concern in the Church [for abuse victims],” she said at the time, “yet to watch privately as a congregation in the Vatican refuses to even acknowledge their letters!...”

Many of these sexual-abuse cases have stalled in Rome, however. The canon-law system arguably disincentivizes quick or decisive action to discipline priests, in part because it can be difficult for Church officials to fully investigate claims that took place decades ago. Canon lawyers are keen to protect the rights of the accused, but that focus has also contributed to cultural problems in the Church. “In the terrible days before the Church came to face this crisis, the missing piece was that understanding of the damage that was done to victims,” O’Malley told me. “All of the attention was on the perpetrator—send them off to a psychiatric facility, and the psychiatrist would then say, ‘He’s cured, you can put him back in ministry.’” And cases are often processed slowly: Even some of the Boston cases are still pending, 17 years later. “It’s like a parallel universe of understanding or function or structure,” Thorp said. “We used to use the term glacial. Now we call it just ‘frozen....’”"