Justice Anne Burke, interim chair of the National Review Board (NRB) on clergy sex abuse, publicly expressed alarm Sept. 20 that the U.S. bishops were planning to appoint a nun to replace one of the five NRB members, including Burke herself, whose terms expire this fall. In two speeches at Loyola University/Chicago and in a Catholic News Service interview, Burke insisted that USCCB president, Bishop Wilton Gregory, agreed when he named the NRB in 2002 that it would be all lay people. A priest or even a nun on the board would compromise its independence to hold bishops accountable, Burke said. But she said there were "forces within the hierarchy that are seeking to derail much of what has occurred," and they have been pushing for months to put clergy on the NRB.
"I have been around Chicago politics for a long time," said Burke. (Her husband, Edward, has been an alderman for 36 years.) "But nothing prepared one for the encounter with the politics of the institutional church. The machinations during this period of fear, perplexity and suspicion were at times medieval."
The NRB and the bishops' own Ad Hoc Sexual Abuse Committee jointly submitted an all-lay list of candidates to Gregory, expecting him to choose only from this list. But in mid-September Gregory faxed to Burke and other NRB members a confidential list of his replacement candidates. A nun was on the list.
A USCCB spokesman said Gregory will probably make public his appointments before the USCCB general meeting Nov. 15-18 in Washington.
Just as Burke spoke at the 2003 CTA conference, another NRB member, New York
defense attorney Pamela Hayes, will speak this year in Milwaukee. Also addressing
the sex abuse crisis and the accountability of bishops will be Louisiana journalist
Jason Berry, who broke the original priest pedophilia story in 1985; Linda Pieczynski,
prosecuting attorney on the CTA board; and Barbara Blaine, president of Survivors
Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP). Link-Up, another national abuse victims
network, will have an exhibition booth. The acclaimed live docu-drama, "Sin:
A Cardinal Deposed," depicting former Boston Cardinal Bernard Law before
the lawyers, will be performed by Bailiwick Repertory, a professional Chicago
theatre company.
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