COMMENTARY – VOTF
and Cardinal George
LETTER to the National Representative Council from VOTF
president Mary Pat Fox:
Dear Friends,
The five Chicago affiliates met on Sunday afternoon
March 26th. At this meeting they reached a consensus
to meet
with Cardinal George. The meeting is currently set
for May 12th and they are continuing to work on moving
up
the meeting. Cardinal George suggested the meeting
instead of a written response to their latest letter.
As you may know the individual Chicago affiliates have
sent letters to the Cardinal since January and have
been working on this correspondence since early December.
In the last letter, from all five affiliates, that
was
sent March 1st and posted on their web site at www.votf-nschi.org,
they included several calls for action including: support
for the extension of the statute of limitations legislation
in all cases of sexual abuse of minors; posting on
the Archdiocesan website the names of the known,
proven or
credibly accused perpetrators of clergy and religious
sexual abuse; and the publication on their web site
of the Defenbaugh and Childers reports investigating
the
Charter breakdown in Chicago. So far Cardinal George
has posted a list of abusers (we are not sure if the
list is comprehensive) and he has posted his policies
and procedures as well as the Defenbaugh and Childers
reports and recommendations on the website. There is
more to be done.
I participated in a conference call with the leadership
team from the Chicago affiliates. They discussed their
plans to work together using the direct-action training
that VOTF has been providing to develop their agenda
and conduct the meeting. The goal of the meeting with
Cardinal George is to engage the Archdiocese in working
with the laity to implement substantive change in the
processes and procedures to provide a safe environment
for children throughout the Church in Chicago and to
ensure that the process for identifying and removing
abusers is fully implemented.
The Chicago affiliates are working very
hard to live VOTF’s three goals at the same time. I know there
has been much discussion in the past weeks about whether
or not we can impact change in the Church. Some say that
we cannot do this from the outside – that it has
to come from the inside. Here is a situation where the
Cardinal has offered to meet with Voice of the Faithful,
has admitted he was wrong, has apologized, is taking
responsibility for what has happened and has already
met some of the demands of the local affiliates. Our
third goal originally came into being because we, VOTF,
wanted to work to eliminate the possibility of this type
of crisis and behavior happening again in our Church.
We have not been successful yet. I continue to believe
that for us to be successful the laity must be engaged
in the process. The laity involved in such a process
must be genuinely representative of the laity rather
than handpicked and appointed as we have today. The Chicago
affiliates are working toward this goal. We need to support
them.
In addition the steering committee of the NRC and I
will be discussing the Chicago situation.
The audit of compliance with the Charter to Protect
Children and Young People has been released; you
can find the
reports at www.usccb.org . Chicago passed the audit
and as a result, if the world did not know before,
we know
now that the self-audits are not working. We need to
fix the system. I encourage you to use this information
as you work on the campaigns for Accountability Now and your ongoing actions in your local affiliates.