Apr 21, 2002 5 min read

VATICAN CITY (AP) – A top churchman makes a clandestine trip to Rome, slips in and out of the Vatican unnoticed and later announces he raised the possibility with the pope of resigning. The recent journey of Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, one of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, was unusual even by today’s tight standards of secrecy at the Vatican.

But these are strange and difficult times for the American church, rocked by waves of sex abuse scandals that have shaken the confidence of the faithful, led to the resignation of one bishop, and cost the church millions of dollars in legal settlements.

The secret visit by Law and top-level talks with an American delegation earlier this month seemed to galvanize the Vatican, leading Pope John Paul II to summon the country’s cardinals to two days of extraordinary meetings Tuesday and Wednesday.

“Obviously this is something that has touched him deeply,” said Monsignor Kevin C. McCoy, rector of the North American College, the American seminary in Rome. “What better way to be informed than to invite your cardinals.”

The recent meetings gave John Paul a “sense of urgency,” Monsignor Francis Maniscalco, a spokesman for the U.S. bishops, said in Rome.

The cardinals will be looking to the Vatican for guidance and backing on a wide range of issues, foremost among them whether the church should ever consider reassigning sex offenders and creating a uniform American policy for reporting abuse claims to police.

“One of our main concerns will be to focus on the effects of clerical sexual abuse upon its victims,” the American cardinal based at the Vatican, J. Francis Stafford, said Saturday.

The meeting could also set off talk on such usually taboo subjects as the celibacy requirement, the ordination of women and gays in the priesthood.

All 13 U.S. cardinals were invited to the meeting, but 81-year-old Cardinal James Hickey, the retired archbishop of Washington, was too frail to make the trip. Philadelphia’s Cardinal Anthony J. Bevilacqua is among those attending.

The American cardinals will sit down in morning and afternoon sessions, meeting with three top Vatican officials: Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos of the Congregation for the Clergy, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re of the Congregation for Bishops.

John Paul will address the cardinals at the start of the meeting and will spend as much time with the American prelates during the two days as his schedule allows, Vatican officials said. On Wednesday, for example, he will hold his regular general audience.

The meeting will be held in the frescoed Sala Bologna, in the Apostolic Palace, whose large conference table is used for periodic meetings of Vatican officials.

It is not unusual for the Vatican to summon prelates of a particular country for talks. But such meetings are usually worked out over months and not called just a week ahead of time as the American summit was.

The Vatican and the U.S. church are planning their own separate daily briefings, an American-style public relations effort to counter criticism that the Vatican and the pope have been slow to grasp what has become a devastating problem for the American church.

“They want to assure the whole country that this is being dealt with,” Maniscalco said.

Since revelations began pouring out early this year, the pope’s only public reference to the issue came in a pre-Easter letter to priests March 21. He said a “dark shadow of suspicion” had been cast over priests “by some of our brothers who have betrayed the grace of ordination.”

The visit from Law may have changed things. He has come under enormous criticism from both conservatives and liberals for his handling of sex abuse cases in the Boston Archdiocese. His stealth journey might have emphasized the gravity of the problem.

In a statement released Tuesday, only after his return home, he said, “The fact that my resignation has been proposed as necessary was part of my presentation.”

But he said his talks at the Vatican encouraged him to stay on.

Until recently, a number of Vatican officials have tended to blame the U.S. church crisis on the news media and a complicated legal system.

Castrillon Hoyos, who introduced the pope’s pre-Easter letter to journalists, chafed during the briefing at the number of questions being asked in English by American reporters. Vatican news conferences are usually conducted in Italian.

“It’s already an X-ray of the problem that so many questions were in English,” the Colombian cardinal said.

But scandals have cropped up in other countries in recent years, including Ireland, France and Australia. Last month, an archbishop in John Paul’s native Poland was forced to resign, accused of making sexual advances on young seminarians.

This week, the Vatican will be dealing with the problem directly.