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.



In the Vineyard
April 6, 2006
Volume 5, Issue 7
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