...and to obey the Girl Scout Laws

By Diogenes ( articles ) | May 31, 2003

The Archdiocese will investigate complaints of child abuse in accord with the principles of truth, honesty, openness, and justice, while respecting confidentiality, privacy, and the reputation of persons. [Article 7.1]

This from the Archdiocese of Boston's new abuse guidelines. To be fair, nobody is at his most lucid and articulate when an angry adversary is holding a pistol to his head, but one can't help but get a sense of "I'll tell you anything you want to hear" in this statement. Could the authors really tell us, if we asked, what the difference is between "truth" and "honesty" in this context?

Missing, oddly, is the norm that says, "Any clergyman found to have obstructed justice or to have been complicit in its obstruction shall be degraded from his clerical state and reported to the appropriate officials of law enforcement."