A tough article from Orange County

Bishop of Orange Tod Brown is spending $90,000 over four months in diocese funds to hire a PR agency to advise the diocese on how to handle an ongoing sexual abuse crisis that is threatening the diocese’s fund-raising and cathedral-building efforts.

The result, announced at a press conference at a Garden Grove hotel on Jan. 15, is called “The Covenant With the Faithful.” It features seven “theses,” or promises, to local Catholics. In a follow-up act last Sunday, Bishop Brown, surrounded by supporters, nailed those theses to the front door at Holy Family Cathedral in Orange.

….Remember, also, that one cannot be truly penitent if one is still involved in the sins for which one is repenting. The diocese’s Thesis No. 2 said that it will follow “our own diocesan policies for the prevention of the abuse of children and young people.” But the bishop has recently violated his own zero-tolerance policies, put into place by a judge as part of a $5.2 million legal settlement.

Until he was embarrassed by media coverage in July, the bishop did not remove from active ministry two priests credibly accused of downloading child pornography on their computers and a choir director who was once convicted of lewd conduct with a teen.

Ironically, just weeks before the news came out about his breaking of his own policy, the bishop responded on the diocese Web sites to previous criticisms in this column about his inaction. In that message, the bishop claims to have gone through church records, having “immediately removed from ministry any person who has ever been credibly accused of or admitted to sexual misconduct.”

Then the reports hit about the two priests and choir director, undermining the claims the bishop made (and which remain on the diocese Web site). Rather than apologize, the bishop engaged in acts of hair-splitting that are unseemly for a man of his position.

Do you know what I say? I say thank God for the secular media.