When will bishops be held accountable?

FR Sean McDonagh (Letters, Dec 3) rightly calls for the media to be held accountable.

He will have no objection, then, to the hierarchy of the Catholic Church being held accountable for the crime of covering up clerical child abuse.

While it may be true that a relatively small number of priests raped children, these episodes took place on a global scale. Thus the number of bishops who knew of the abuse and took part in covering it up extends to a much larger number.

Indeed, all of them must have known, yet not one invoked his Christian conscience to do anything about it, preferring instead to protect both the abusers and the Church’s reputation.

Could Fr McDonagh tell us when we can expect the first trials of bishops for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice for their so-called “errors of judgement”?

Alistair McBay

Lawmuirview

Methven

Scotland