STAR-BULLETIN Hawaii Catholic Bishop Francis DiLorenzo voted in favor of the church's new policy.

Isle bishop backs
strict priest policy

He says other bishops should
not tolerate criminal behavior

Professors advise church to rebuild trust

---

By Mary Adamski
madamski@starbulletin.com

Hawaii Catholic Bishop Francis DiLorenzo told his fellow prelates that child molestation ranks with murder, cannibalism and incest as aberrant behavior that society will not tolerate.

The short speech Thursday by the leader of the state's 200,000 Catholics was made during closed-door debate at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops convention in Dallas.

In a 239-13 vote yesterday in Dallas, the bishops adopted a policy for dealing with sexually abusive priests and providing scrutiny to avoid the kind of cover-ups that generated scandals this year.

DiLorenzo said he voted for the new policy, which allows some abusive clergy to remain in the priesthood but would bar them from face-to-face contact with parishioners.

Some of the measures the bishops vowed to implement are already in practice in the Hawaii diocese, particularly a mandate to remove a priest from ministry if there is a substantiated allegation of sexual abuse of a minor.

"I got up and said you have to understand that the child molestation is a social and cultural taboo as well as a moral issue," DiLorenzo said in a telephone interview last night from Dallas. "People agree as a society that there are some things we cannot as a society condone. There's no such thing as accepting murder in resolution of a dispute, or if you committed cannibalism just one time, don't let us hear about a second offense.

"People who do these things are seriously flawed," DiLorenzo said he told the convention. "A priest is an icon of Jesus, and a priest who does these things cannot be a good icon of Jesus in the eyes of people."

Victims' groups were critical of the bishops for not going beyond removing offenders from public ministry, and urged that perpetrators be forced out of the priesthood. That is still a penalty that a bishop may still pursue in individual cases.

"Some people say defrock him. I think the main goal is the protection of young people, to make sure the perpetrator never functions again and puts youngsters at risk," DiLorenzo said. "How far do you need to go to achieve your intended end?"

He said that unless a priest agreed to be laicized (voluntarily removed from the priesthood), the victims would have to testify. "Do you need to drag everybody in to relive this horror? I don't know what purpose it serves if he is already not functioning."

He pointed to the four men he removed from ministry after he became bishop in 1993. They are not allowed to function as priests, and, he said, he does not anticipate the diocese trying to take the next step of having them laicized.

"This is a fatally flawed personality," said the bishop. "It is obvious to me they have psychiatric problems, so I give them a medical retirement."

DiLorenzo said Hawaii and many other dioceses already had implemented policies to deal with sex abuse following 1992 guidelines from the American bishops' organization. "I think over the past 10 years, there have been substantial gains which no one is talking about.

"The interesting thing is, you don't have a lot of cases currently. There is not an avalanche of new names of people who are doing it now. All the cases being talked about as they just happened two weeks ago, they are all from 20, 30, 40 years ago."

"I think zero tolerance is new to some, but in general, most of the stuff in this current text, we've been doing for the last 10 years," DiLorenzo said.