BRIDGEPORT Affiliate News
The Diocese has announced that it is appealing that ruling to the United States Supreme Court. The Diocese alleges that unsealing the documents would violate its privacy rights as well as its right, under the First Amendment, to select and evaluate its ministers.
The Diocese also argues that the pertinent documents were available to the victims and their attorneys when the cases were first heard and need not be made available now to the news media or to the general public.
This expensive and prolonged legal wrangling ignores the right of the Catholic faithful, lay women and men, religious women and men, and priests, to a full accounting of the terrible crisis that has undermined the Church’s good name, cast suspicion on all priests, and deprived the bishops of whatever moral authority they may have had.
The Second Vatican Council in its Constitution on the Church declared that the Church is the People of God, the whole body of the faithful. Despite that, canon law still vests absolute control of clergy, laity, and parishes in the bishop. When the Diocese claims that its First Amendment rights are violated, it means that the bishop’s rights are violated. The rest of the faithful have no say in any of these matters. Laypeople at best can give counsel, but they have no real authority in the Church.
As faithful Catholics, we protest the continuing expenditure of untold sums of money to pursue a cause that makes a mockery of the pledge of accountability proclaimed by the bishops at their meeting in Dallas in 2002.
The time has come to put a stop to this foolish course, to accept full responsibility for the tragedy that has taken place, and to give a full and honest accounting by releasing the court documents.
If the Church is to be renewed and this blotch on the seamless garment of Jesus Christ, the head of the Church, is to be erased, then the policy of secrecy, obfuscation, and delay must be abandoned forever. The Church and its leaders must stand upright in God’s clear light.
