Church to check priests’ lifestyles

How are their morals holding up?

Amid allegations of impropriety, the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of the Philippines (CBCP) is set to conduct its own lifestyle check on priests.

However, the lifestyle check will focus on the clerics’ moral lifestyles rather than the more material matter of finances.

CBCP secretary general Hernando Coronel said yesterday that the "moral lifestyle check" is the inevitable offshoot of the protocol on sexual behavior they are set to complete by September.

Guidelines for the lifestyle check, however, must first be sent to the Vatican for approval — a process that could take months.

"We will look into their (priests’) lifestyles," Coronel said at an informal press conference, to determine "whether they have girlfriends, children or whether they are gay."

The STAR earlier came out with a two-part report detailing how, while the cases of former Antipolo Bishop Crisostomo Yalung and former Novaliches Bishop Teodoro Bacani prompted the Church to act with "more urgency" to discipline its clergy, worse cases than those of the two bishops have never been met with the same sense of exigency because the public never knew about them.

Yalung allegedly fathered two children and Bacani was accused of sexual harassment by his secretary.

Coronel did not explain how the Church would go about investigating the morality of its priests. He did say that these details would be part of their protocol. CBCP members agreed in principal at their plenary meeting in July that a grievances committee would be set up in each diocese to receive complaints against erring priests.

But the more contentious issue in the protocol is whether the Church will immediately dismiss a rogue priest or punish him less harshly and make an effort to reform him.

Based on its 2001 statistics, there are 118 bishops, 5,122 diocesan or parish priests and 2,492 religious priests.

The Church is also in the process of refining its seminary formation guidelines in order to identify potential problem priests before they are ordained or, worse, promoted to bishop.

Under the Catholic Church’s Canon Law, bishops "attain the fullness" of being a priest and, therefore, can no longer be dismissed — whether or not they have committed grave acts of misconduct.