San Francisco, USA - Archbishop William Levada's move to Rome this summer will offer the former San Francisco prelate little respite from the clergy sex abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church.
Levada's new job as Pope Benedict XVI's chief doctrinal watchdog includes leading the Vatican's investigation of hundreds of ordained clergymen suspended from public ministry amid allegations they had sexually abused children.
Anne Burke, the former head of the U.S. bishops' National Review Board set up to study the abuse crisis, said Levada's new office is overwhelmed with a backlog of some 700 cases. "Rome has not been set up for these kind of (church) trials," said Burke, a state appeals court judge in Illinois.
Burke said U.S. bishops are largely responsible for the backlog because they have not provided adequate information to the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which decides whether to permanently suspend, defrock or otherwise discipline clerics accused of abuse.
"It's not that the abuse didn't happen, but they (Vatican officials) need to prove it in a trial," Burke said. "You can be cynical and say that some bishops don't really want these priests to be laicized (defrocked)."
It's virtually impossible for outsiders to know who those priests are. In fact, there is no way of telling how many cases are awaiting action in Rome or how many are slated for a full canonical trial, said Monsignor Ronny Jenkins, a canon law expert at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.; he is a consultant to the U.S. bishops.
Many U.S. bishops -- including Levada -- have declined to release the names of priests they have suspended in the face of credible accusations of child abuse. Vatican officials are even more tightlipped.
"The courts of the Holy See have a long tradition of confidentiality with internal matters," Jenkins said.
Levada, who became the highest ranking American in church history when the pope chose him to take over the doctrinal post the pope had held for more than two decades, declined to be interviewed for this article.
But the backlog of priest suspensions is widely known. Early this year, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops' reported that 256 diocesan priests and deacons "remain temporarily removed from ministry pending investigations of allegations."
"We are trying to help the American bishops with their cases, many of which they inherited," said the Rev. J. Augustine di Noia, the undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The overload of cases at the Vatican follows the U.S. bishops' June 2002 adoption of "zero tolerance" rules suspending priests with one or more credible allegations of sexually abusing a minor -- even a single decades-old accusation.
The new rules -- which are up for review at a bishops' meeting next month in Chicago -- also require church leaders to report most cases to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
The bishops are in a bind, acknowledged the Rev. Thomas Doyle, a former Vatican diplomat and co-author of a 1985 memo warning the U.S. bishops of the coming sex abuse crisis. Priests' reputations can be ruined by false accusations.
"Bishops may be caught between a rock and a hard place, but they created the rock and the hard place when they tried to cover all this up," Doyle said.