Can the laity hold bishops accountable? Jason Negri, next.

Hello, and welcome again to focus the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding,

and defending your Catholic faith. Great deal of suffering in recent decades around the

sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, and then the repeated problems in confronting the

sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. It leaves the laity wondering what is our role in all

of this. We're not congregationalists, we're not Presbyterians, we're Catholics, we're one

body, and the bishops have a role given to them by Jesus Christ, one that we cannot usurp,

but there must be something we can do to forward the interests of the Church and return the Church

to the kind of posture where she can truly evangelize the world. Share the good news. That's what we're

here to do and invite other people to live in that good news. Our guest for this episode is Jason

Negri, he's the assistant director of the Patience Rights Council and one of the founders of the

Daniel Coalition, a coalition formed, in fact, to help hold bishops' feet to the fire. It's a

delicate task with various theological implications, so we asked him how are they going about doing that.

Jason Negri, thank you very much for being on this. Thank you. I want to ask you about the

Daniel Coalition, what it is, and how you got involved with it. So first of all, what is the Daniel

Coalition? The Daniel Coalition is a nonprofit organization started by Lake Catholics with a dual

role, first to provide some accountability in our diocese for our bishops and our priests,

and the overarching concern is, of course, to provide advocacy for victims of clerical sexual abuse.

And how long has it been going? We formed in fall of 2018, so two and a half years or so.

Okay, so we've been at this for a generation now. I mean, I remember the meetings in the 1990s

and then the total disaster in the early 2000s, and then you formed in 2018. So what's the

catalyst for forming this coalition now? Well, it was the revelations regarding then Cardinal

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