Pandemic Prompts Painfully Predictable Palaver
By CHRISTOPHER MANION Last week the USCCB announced the retirement of Bishop R. Daniel Conlon of Joliet. It was Bishop Conlon, we recall, who once chaired the conference’s Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People. In August 2012, he addressed the National Safe Environment and Victim Assistance Coordinators Leadership Conference in Omaha. After ten years of failed cover-ups, he was blunt. The bishops’ credibility was “shredded,” he told them. Bishop Conlon likened our own era to the Reformation, when “the episcopacy, the regular clergy, even the papacy were discredited.” While Bishop Conlon had once thought that the Charter, “coupled with some decent publicity, would turn public opinion around….I now know this was an illusion,” he told the group.…Continue Reading