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"If the pope can fire a bishop, that implies he's their supervisor," said Nick Cafardi, a U.S. canon lawyer and former chairman of the U.S. bishops' lay review board that monitored clerical abuse. "This will invite more lawsuits attempting to sue the pope in American courts." Jeffrey Anderson, who is seeking to hold the Holy See liable for a case of an abusive priest in Oregon, said the Vatican was trying to have it both ways. "They will remove, using their canon laws and their own protocols, bishops, priests and clerics for any reasons
-- for theological or any other reasons -- but when it comes to sexual misconduct, they never use those same standards," he said. Even the most well-known case, that of Cardinal Bernard Law, ended when Law offered his resignation after the sex abuse scandal exploded in his Boston archdiocese 2002. Law subsequently was named archpriest of one of the Vatican's basilicas in Rome, St. Mary Major. That said, things may be changing: The Vatican's sex crimes prosecutor, Monsignor Charles Scicluna, warned in February that bishops could face possible church sanctions for malicious or fraudulent negligence if they fail to follow the Vatican's rules on handling sexually abusive priests. But he acknowledged that such bishop accountability needed to be "further developed."
[Associated
Press;
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