Irish Women Judges Save the Church

As a follow-on to my previous post, Irish women doing more to save the church from the judicial bench than they ever could from the Chancery. In a previous post I described how Justice Anne Burke insisted that the Vatican pay attention to priestly pedophilia in the American church. After she overcame stalling tactics on the part of the papal nuncio and reached Cardinal Ratzinger.

America magazine has this quote from Justice Anne Burke “Unlike many bishops and cardinals in the U.S.—some who treated us with disdain—he wanted to hear what was going on in the United States,” said Illinois Appellate Court Justice Anne M. Burke. She was interim president of the review board when she and two other members visited with Cardinal Ratzinger at his Vatican office on Jan. 25, 2004. William R. Burleigh, another board member, said that the cardinal expressed a deep awareness and concern about the problem of sexual abuse." (subscriber's only)

Justice Constance Sweeney presided over the pedophilia cases involving Cardinal Law.

There is a lesson here. Chancery offices all across the world are filled with men. Two Irish women lawyers, both of them educated in Catholic schools, are doing more to reform the church than all of the men combined.

Memo to the Bishops: "You can do what you want inside the Chancery. When the welfare of children is involved, never let an Irish grandmother get on your case."

Comments

[Jay]

I think your statement "Two Irish women lawyers . . . are doing more to reform the church than all of the men combined" is taking it a lot too far.

Also, I don't believe "reform" is what's happening here - this isn't a whole Church problem, it's an individual priest problem and a bishop issue, so we don't need "reform," we need some small changes in how priests and bishops react to this issue.

Just my two cents.

God bless,
Jay

[Herb Ely]

Jay,
Maybe you're right. By calling it a "reform" I may be taking it too far. Justices Sweeney and Burke could not have brought about changes without the help of men inside and outside of the church. It is saying too much to say that these two women are doing more to reform the church.

while "reform" may not be the correct word, I don't know what other word to use. To me, the issue is not whether individual priests were abusing children and a few bishops were tolerating - even enabling - it. This issue is that the rest of the hierarchy issued statements but failed to act. This failure created the appearance of a whole church problem. We do need some changes in how priests and bishops react to the issue. The first change is to send some signals that abuse of children will not be tolerated. The fact that Benedict XVI seems to understand this is, to me, a big change and the reason why I continue blogging on the issue.

I'd like to be proven wrong on this. At a minimum, I would like to see the hierarchy take the issue of child abuse as seriously as the Air Force Academy took the issue of women cadets being raped. Even there, the Air force acted only after outside pressure. (I do realize that the situations are not parallell>)