Church Punishes Priests but Protects Bishops, Critics Say

Bishops say they cannot punish each other over the issue because that is solely the prerogative of the pope. In a 2002 "Statement of Episcopal Commitment," the bishops promised to apply the sexual abuse rules to themselves and to offer each other "fraternal correction" -- making recommendations to each other, or to the Vatican, if bishops need to step down or be removed.

Sister Mary Ann Walsh, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, declined to say whether any bishops have been subject to fraternal correction. It is "brother to brother," she said. "It's not something that public announcements are made about."

But activists say the system of informal oversight does not work. They want to see the pope force bishops into retirement, suspend them or otherwise discipline them for their actions -- or inaction.

"It's not like Enron, where shareholders can get rid of their board if they're acting incorrectly," said Illinois Supreme Court Justice Anne M. Burke, who was a member of the lay board appointed by the bishops in 2002 to monitor reform efforts. Burke, along with other members of the lay board, met with then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, in 2004 to complain about the conduct of some bishops.

"Until the pope takes action as regards to those folks . . . we can't really believe that anything is going to change," McKiernan said. "It's quite intolerable that bishops who are responsible [for cover-ups] are still in positions of honor, positions of responsibility, in dioceses."

In Yakima -- a rural parish in central Washington that is nearly 70 percent Hispanic -- bishop Sevilla has been scrambling to do damage control.

Last month, he apologized for hiring a former seminarian, Juan Jose González Rios, in 2003, even though Sevilla knew Gonzalez was under investigation for viewing child pornography. González, 37, who maintains his innocence, is awaiting arraignment on the child pornography charges.

Sevilla has also acknowledged that he had not alerted his flock to the case of the Rev. Jose Joaquin Estrada Arango, 42, who had worked at four churches in Yakima between 2001 and 2003, before being transferred to a nearby diocese in Oregon, where he was convicted of sexual abuse for fondling a 14-year-old girl. Estrada was deported to Colombia.

"Should I have publicized Father Estrada's conviction? Perhaps so," Sevilla said in a news release. "But I certainly didn't hide it."

In another case, in 1999, Sevilla determined in that a deacon had molested a 17-year-old boy. The deacon fled to Mexico and took a job as an Episcopal priest, but Sevilla did not write the Mexican archbishop to alert him of the deacon's past until 2005. Siler, the diocese spokesman, said Sevilla assumed the archbishop had conducted a background check on the priest, who has since been permanently barred from the Episcopal priesthood.

Siler said the cases are isolated. But local activists are angry.

"Our diocese has repeatedly erred on the part of protecting offending clerics," said Robert Fontana, a former Yakima Diocese employee who now works with an activist group, Voice of the Faithful. "There is no mechanism in place to challenge the bishop's behavior except media exposure and lawsuits. We still haven't gotten beyond that. That's amazing to me."