Cardinal Meeting With Voice Of The Faithful

BOSTON -- For the first time, Boston's Cardinal Bernard Law has agreed to meet with the lay Catholic group called Voice of the Faithful.

NewsCenter 5's Gail Huff reported that the group has been waiting for months to meet with Law. It has a long list of items for discussion. On Tuesday, the group will share with Law their vision for restructuring the Catholic church, which has been shaken by a year's worth of revelations of alleged sex abuse of children by priests.

The Boston archdiocese, in particular, has come under fire for reassigning priests from parish to parish, even though the archdiocese knew the priests had been accused of assaulting children.

The Voice of the Faithful, which has 30 chapters and more than 25,000 members, formed in the wake of the abuse revelations, vowing to "Keep the Faith, Change the Church."

"We are the church, we are the body of Christ," group members have said. They have been meeting in church basements, banned from parish halls by the church hierarchy. They are committed to increasing the involvement of the laity in church governance in order to prevent the kind of sex scandals which have rocked the church.

But now, reversing an earlier ban, Law has said he will allow the group to meet in parish halls as long as they get approval from pastors. He says his latest edict only applies to existing chapters, not to newly formed groups.

Another issue is money. Concerned that money donated to the church will go to paying church legal fees over the sex scandal, instead of to the archdiocese's charities, Voice of the Faithful has raised $56,000 which it has offered directly to the charities. The cardinal has refused to allow the charities to accept the money, saying that direct donations undermine his fundraising abilities.

The third issue the group hopes to take up is lay involvement in implementing new guidelines for protecting children against sex abuse. The latest guidelines were drawn up by U.S. Catholic bishops and recently approved at a meeting in Washington, D.C.

Meantime, in another blow to the Boston archdiocese, a judge ruled that church officials cannot keep sealed from the public some 11,000 internal documents regarding abusive priests. This comes as about 40 lawyers for the church and for abuse victims met in a Boston hotel Monday, trying to settle hundreds of lawsuits against the archdiocese. The newly released records could have an impact on the negotiations.

"If [the judge] ever allows in all that evidence, there's no question that the archdiocese would be very intelligent to get this thing settled before juries award tremendous damages," said former judge Robert Barton.

No date has been set for the attorneys on both sides to continue negotiating.