Here’s a story about some bishops balking at filling a survey as part of the new bishops’ conference child protection office. One thing leaped out at me:
The bishops will gather next week in St. Louis for their semiannual convention, and several have indicated they will call for changes in the questionnaire, which sought a complete accounting of every U.S. priest who has been accused of sexual misconduct with minors since 1950. That could force McChesney, the National Review Board and researchers at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice to delay or redesign the $250,000 study. [emphasis added]
250,000 dollars sounds cheap for this kind of effort. There were at least 50,000 priests within this time period. This translates to roughly 5.00 dollars per priest. Assuming people are being paid roughly 20 dollars an hour (including overhead for benefits), this would translate into 15 minutes per priest for looking up records, verifiying data, recording the data, including the data and analyzing the data in the final report. I’d say this was a bargain. Some records will probably take hours to find as they will be stored in archives and not conviently located. If it were me, I would require everything for the past 20 years and anything beyond that would be best effort.
One of the problems mentioned in the article is that the Bishops conference can’t really discipline Bishops who refuse to observe the guidelines.
Well that may be so but there is a host of things they can do with a Bishop who is insistant on risking young children’s well being or prolonging the recovery time for the scandal by being obstructionist or non-compliant:
1. Implement the following restrictions on Bishops who are having repeated problems causing scandal in the Church:
a. Can’t participate in committees at national level
b. Can’t serve on boards of directors for organizations outside of their diocese
c. Can’t speak outside of own dioceses
d. Can’t vote at Bishops conference
e. Can’t participate in national organizations
f. Stop sending seminarians from other dioceses to the offending bishop’s diosecan seminary.
e. whatever else that one can think of to drive the point home.
All of the above could be done to “help” these bishops focus their energies on their serious diocesan problems.