American Catholic Bishops this week have made a number of so-called "revisions" to the Dallas Charter that are part of an effort by many bishops and probably the Vatican to eventually remove zero-tolerance for child sex abuse in the Catholic Church.

Most alarmingly, a new study is being commissioned at the urging of Dr. Paul McHugh of the National Review Board [citing the Baltimore Sunarticle in the post below]

McHugh, once head of the department of psychiatry at John Hopkins, has a long and controversial history of taking anti-law enforcement positions on the treatment of child sex offenders. McHugh was appointed three years ago by the bishops to the lay National Review Board.

While the chair of psychiatry at John Hopkin's university, McHugh's subordinate, sex disorder clinic head Dr. Fred Berlin admitted that he covered up for sex criminals and violated state law.

Dr. McHugh said that the Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic was correct to conceal multiple incidents of child rape and fondling to police. This, despite a state law that required that staffers report these crimes against children.

The Sexual Disorders Clinic was founded by Dr. John Money, who openly defends pedophilia and once gave an interview to Paidika, the Dutch journal of pedophilia. In his interview, Money said that a relationship between a boy and a man would not be pathological in any way-as long as it was by mutual consent.

McHugh, along with priest psychologists from St. Luke's Institute in Maryland, Frs. Steven Rossetti and Canice Conners, have long advocated the return of "some" child abusers to ministry. Both Conners and Rossetti are members of the bishop's ad hoc committee on sexual abuse.

Rossetti, the current president of St. Luke's, has been cited by Maryland authorities for never reporting a child sex offender cleric while head of he St. Luke's institute.

Indeed, against the majority of clinicians and scientists working with sex offenders, McHugh, Conners and Rossetti have all championed to bishops the idea that most child priest sex offenders are not "real" pedophiles.

In an alarming development last year, the Vatican hosted a symposium on pedophilia, which, of course, included Frs. Conners and Rossetti. Both men continued to urge the Vatican to drop zero-tolerance for all acts of criminal child sexual abuse (see story).

Other developments at the bishop's conference this week point in the same general direction, including, altering canon law to make it easier for individual bishops to one day return abusive priests to at least "limited ministry."

Three years after the Dallas Charter the American Bishops should be announcing this week that they are urging the Vatican to extend the Dallas Charter to the world wide church. Child abuse in countries without human and civil rights protections for children make youngsters especially vulnerable to clerical offenders. There is estimated to be some 450,000 clerics in the world wide Catholic church. Even at conservative estimates, some 20,000 sex offenders are likely abusing children around the globe.

Instead, this week the bishops are turning to the same small "usual expert suspects" who recommended for years that priests can be secretly and successfully put back into ministry if they had assaulted a child.

Each bishop in the United States owes it to the children under their pastoral care to announce clearly and unequivocally that he will endorse and maintain zero-tolerance for the rest of his life and beg the new pope to do the same for the rest of the catholic world.

¶ 6/17/2005 04:16:00 PM