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Rome and due process

Christian Century, Dec 18, 2002 by James A. Burke

AS AN ATTORNEY, I question the Vatican's conditional rejection of the American bishops' "zero tolerance" for child abuser priests (News, Nov. 20-Dec. 3). The reason given was that the policy violated the due process rights of the. accused priests by failing to give them a timely and meaningful opportunity to be heard. The concept of due process is largely an American concept developed as an extension of the rights our founders viewed as the inherent lights of Englishmen, and as developed by our courts. The Supreme Court has spoken several times on the subject and the demand by the Vatican for some procedural fairness is not, by itself, unreasonable.

The question, however, is how and why the Vatican--hardly a democratic institution--must instruct the American Bishops' Conference on this American concept. Did not the bishops have access to lawyers who could have told them the same thing? Commonweal editor Margaret Steinfels suggested recently in the New York Times that the Vatican was more concerned about power than fairness. Be that as it may, the American bishops' failure to provide for such process initially seems another example of ineffective vision and dysfunction by American Catholic leaders.