VATICAN CITY (CNS): Bishops worldwide are en-couraged to meet with victims of clerical sex abuse, just as Pope Benedict XVI has done, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said.
“There is nothing that helps bishops or priests learn about this problem better than meeting with the victims and hearing their stories,” United States Cardinal William Levada said in a televised interview on April 27.
Pope Benedict XVI has met with victims several times, and “that’s an example to bishops”, he said.
The interview, which took place in the cardinal’s Vatican office, aired on PBS’ The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and was to be one of a series of reports from the Vatican.
In the 14-minute interview, Cardinal Levada said he did not want to “scapegoat anybody or have a conspiracy theory”, but he thought there has been “a certain media bias” in the way media outlets have covered the sex abuse scandals.
He said that while sex abuse occurred in other environments, members of the Church “should hold ourselves to a higher standard, in the sense that this is not something that one would have expected” because a priest was ordained to be a good shepherd of his flock.
Concerning the recent resignation of bishops over their handling of sex abuse cases, Cardinal Levada said he would not be surprised if there were more resignations to follow. He said the standard by which bishops were expected to address clerical sex abuse was “not new, but it’s being applied more rigorously than in the past”.
“I will look forward to helping my brother bishops around the world see what can be done if you take good concrete steps, put things out on the table, make sure that you’ve got a program to educate your priests and screen for any problem areas as you are admitting priests and have a good program for (a) safe environment,” he said.
“I think those are key things that make our people feel secure” and such procedures “should be something that can be done throughout the Church”, he said.
The Vatican posted online in mid-April a summary of the Vatican’s procedures for handling sex abuse allegations against priests, which were adopted in the wake of a 2001 papal document that established strict universal norms for handling such cases and placed these cases under the authority of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Cardinal Levada said publishing the summary online was done because “it seemed good to put this in writing and at least put it as guidance for bishops” as well as to answer the general public’s questions about what the Church’s rules were and what bishops were required to do.
