Bishop: Church credibility on sexual abuse ‘shredded’

The U.S. Catholic bishops’ point man on sexual abuse has said that the hierarchy’s credibility on fixing the problem has been “shredded” and that the situation is comparable to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.”

Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet, Illinois, told an August conference of staffers who oversee child safety programs in American dioceses that he had always assumed that consistently implementing the bishops’ policies on child protection, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around.”

“I now know this was an illusion,” Conlon, chairman of the bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People, said in an address on August 13 to the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha, Nebraska. His talk was published in the August 30 edition of Origins, an affiliate of Catholic News Service.