CAN A SHEPHERD BE A TRUE SHEPHERD IF HE IS LOST OR SILENT????
Sheep without shepherds
For ordinary Catholics, the failures of their leaders
have created a two-decade test of faith
Nov. 17, 2018
Here is a striking fact about the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. The sex abuse crisis in the early 2000s, the horrid revelations of predation that began in Boston in 2001, did not have an obvious long-term effect on the practice of the faith.
Yes, American Catholicism has lost millions of its baptized flock over the last 50 years. But that decline was steepest in the 1960s and 1970s; by the turn of the millennium, some trends (attendance at Mass, for instance) had stabilized, and the number of Catholics marrying in the Church and baptizing their children had settled into a slower decline.
After the 2001 scandals Gallup showed a temporary plunge in reported attendance at Mass — but then a swift rebound. Other data showed no clear effect on attendance at all. Neither ordinations nor adult conversions dramatically declined. There were local collapses and individual crises of faith, and the moral authority of the bishops was dramatically weakened.
But as an institution, the Roman Catholic Church seemed to weather the storm better than might have been expected. The Catholic belief that the sacraments are more important than the sins of the men responsible for offering them was tested — and seemingly endured.
The question hanging over American Catholicism today, as it endures a second purgatorial experience with scandal, is whether this time is different, whether the Church’s peculiar post-1970s mix of resilience, stagnation and decay can survive a second agony.
The question was sharpened by last week’s fiasco in Baltimore, at the General Assembly of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, where
the American Church’s shepherds were supposed to vote on some kind of plan to handle malfeasance within their ranks — only to have their intentions swatted down, at the last minute, by the Vatican’s insistence that any accountability measures be hashed out in Rome some months hence.
The fiasco was not surprising —
the tone-deafness and self-protectiveness of the Roman intervention, the bafflement and internal divisions of the American bishops, and the liberal-versus-conservative arguments that followed were all characteristic of Catholicism’s crisis under Pope Francis.
But in being unsurprising the fiasco was still revelatory. When the sex abuse scandals broke in 2001 it was possible to imagine that they were just about sex abuse — that the church could simply stop treating predatory priests with therapy, start defrocking them, and move forward chastened and renewed.
Seventeen years later, with neither the American bishops nor Pope Francis able to muster an adequate response to the revelation that a famous cardinal was a predator whose sins were known even as he rose, it’s clear that this was wrong.
The Church has done much better since 2001 in the most basic task of keeping children safe. But in everything else connected to the scandal there is little progress because Catholicism’s leaders cannot agree on what progress means.
It is clear that there is festering sexual and financial corruption in the hierarchy; it is clear that there are problems in the way the Church trains priests and selects bishops. But the Church’s theological factions are sufficiently far apart that each would rather do nothing than let the other side lead reform — because the liberals think the conservatives want an inquisition, the conservatives think the liberals want Episcopalianism, and there is some truth in both caricatures.
Thus all proposals for reform are evaluated through an ideological lens, and neither side has enough confidence to learn something from the other, or to conduct a full purification of its own ranks.
The result, as in secular politics these days, is stalemate and confusion, with a Church increasingly unsure of what it teaches, led by men who can’t agree on how it might be cleansed. Which in turn leaves the Catholic faithful with less hope than in 2001 that their bishops can achieve competence and decency, let alone Christian holiness.
Recently two Catholic journalists I know, Damon Linker and Melinda Henneberger — one a convert drawn to the Church despite his doubts, the other “a true-believing, rosary- and novena-praying graduate” of Catholic schools — have written pieces about how the new scandals are pushing them from practicing to lapsed, Catholic to “ex-Catholic.”
Someday soon (maybe for Advent or Christmas) I will write a column about why
this leave-taking is a terrible mistake. But for today it’s enough to raise the possibility that
Henneberger and Linker are representative of many wavering Catholics who stayed with a compromised leadership in 2001 but won’t stay with a hierarchy that seems bankrupt in 2018 … or for however long the Church’s internal stalemate obstructs justice and forestalls reform.
I think the bishops meeting in Baltimore know that this is a possibility, that they may be responsible for the loss of churchgoers, the loss of souls. I think many have genuinely good intentions, a genuine desperation to figure out what must be done.
And I think their impotence is a lesson, all too literal, in the road that good intentions often pave.
By quashing the American Catholic bishops’ bid for an independent investigation into the burgeoning sex-abuse scandal, the Vatican has left the US hierarchy in an impossible position.
- The bishops cannot ease the anger of an enraged laity without appearing disloyal to Rome;
- they cannot maintain unity among themselves without further alienating their flocks;
- they cannot restore their own credibility without damaging the credibility of the Holy See.
The November meeting of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was expected to bring decisive action, after a painful summer of new revelations about the negligence — and worse — of many American bishops.
The most prominent items on the meeting’s agenda were the proposal for a thorough investigation, controlled by laypeople, and a companion call for a code of conduct to which bishops might be held accountable. But on the eve of the meeting, the Vatican issued instructions that the American bishops should not take action on those two proposals.
When Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the USCCB president, announced the Vatican’s decision, there were audible gasps from the body of bishops. Cardinal DiNardo said that he himself was surprised and disappointed by the Vatican’s instruction, which had been conveyed to him only the previous evening.
The shocking message from Rome deflated the sense of urgency that had surrounded the meeting, and before the meeting adjourned on Wednesday, the bishops — who had arrived in Baltimore in a feisty mood, ready for action — actually voted down an innocuous resolution to “encourage” a thorough disclosure by the Vatican of documents pertaining to the scandalous career of the disgraced former cardinal, Theodore McCarrick.
There were dramatic moments at the USCCB meeting, to be sure.
- A few bishops hinted that they would be ready to vote on the top agenda items despite the Vatican’s instructions.
- The lay leader of the bishops’ National Review Board, Francesco Cesareo, delivered a scorching address in which he told the bishops that they had lost the trust of their people, and recommended that some bishops resign in recognition of their moral failures.
- Cesareo told the bishops that they must fully investigate the charges made this summer by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, a former papal nuncio in Washington, that Vatican officials (including Pope Francis) had advanced McCarrick’s career despite clear evidence of his misconduct.
“No stone must remain unturned,” Cesareo said. “Ignoring these allegations will leave a cloud of doubt over the Church.”
In the weeks leading up to their meeting in Baltimore, dozens of bishops had issued similar calls for a thorough investigation of the Viganò charges.
Cardinal DiNardo had traveled to Rome to ask Pope Francis to authorize an “apostolic visitation” — a Vatican-authorized investigation that would have the authority to require cooperation from reluctant bishops, and to release documents from files both in the US and at the Vatican. But Pope Francis had declined the request.
In fact, far from encouraging the American bishops in their pursuit of the truth, Pope Francis had suggested that the USCCB meeting be postponed—that the American bishops should hold a spiritual retreat rather than discussing the action items on their agenda.
So perhaps
it should not have been a surprise that the Vatican eventually intervened to remove those potentially explosive items from the USCCB agenda. Still, the heavy-handed nature of the action was stunning. The American bishops’ plans had been well known for weeks. Why did the Holy See wait until the night before the bishops gathered?
As soon as Cardinal DiNardo announced the Vatican’s decision to restrict the USCCB agenda, Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago was on his feet, ready to defend the move. Cardinal Cupich — a close ally of Pope Francis, whose promotion within the hierarchy was reportedly championed by McCarrick — had evidently been privy to the Vatican’s plans.
Yet
it was clear that Pope Francis, who has spoken frequently about his desire to decentralize authority within the Church, had made no effort to brief the elected leader of the US bishops’ conference. For that matter,
the pope who has spoken so often about collegial and synodal governance had shown little concern for the opinions of the American bishops.
How could the Vatican justify this high-handed intervention against the American bishops’ bid for reform? Defenders of the move suggested that the Vatican feared some aspects of the USCCB plan might conflict with the Church’s system of canon law.
- But if any such conflicts had arisen, they could have been resolved in due course by the appropriate ecclesiastical tribunals.
- And
Pope Francis has consistently displayed an insouciant attitude about canon law — on several occasions blithely violating canons rather than using his unquestioned authority to amend them — and has frequently inveighed against the “doctors of the law.”
Cardinal DiNardo said that he had been told the Vatican wanted the US bishops to hold off on making plans until after a worldwide conference on sexual abuse, which Pope Francis has scheduled for February 2019.
Yet the Vatican has allowed the French bishops to set their own policies in advance of that meeting, and the Italian bishops’ conference is planning to implement new national standards. Why did the Vatican treat the American bishops differently?
The answer, frustrated American Catholics might legitimately suspect, lies in the specific focus of the USCCB plans: for
an investigation into the career of McCarrick and the charges made by Archbishop Viganò. These are American-based scandals, but they are scandals that — if Viganò’s charges are accurate — point to further corruption in Rome. And the Vatican did not want that investigation to proceed.
How many American bishops would have supported a no-holds-barred inquiry? We might never know.
[Oh, we know, more or less! Did not 187 of them vote NO on that innocuous resolution to simply 'encourage the Holy Father' to make public whatever relevant documents the Vatican has on the McCarrick case? If they did not even have the balls to vote YES - or maybe their balls have become as soft and flaccid as their brains - for that resolution, why expect any decisive and autonomous (rather than automaton-like) action from them at this point?]
But now all of the American bishops will face angry and insistent questions from their people, who want to know
why the hierarchy is not ready for full disclosure. [Because they can't without incriminating themselves in more ways than one!]
No account of the USCCB fiasco in Baltimore would be complete without this behind-the-scenes power play by two of McCarrick's most prominent proteges, now throwing their combined Bergoglio-puppet status to more than make up for McCarrick's forced ejection from the scene and be his surrogates in everything but his name...
Cupich and Wuerl collaborated
on alternative sex abuse proposal
By Ed Condon
Washington D.C., Nov 16, 2018 (CNA) - Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago and Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington collaborated extensively on a recently proposed policy for handling abuse allegations against bishops, CNA has learned.
Cupich submitted the plan Tuesday to leaders of the U.S. bishops’ conference, proffering it as an alternative to a proposal that had been devised by conference officials and staffers.
The conference’s proposed plan would have established an independent lay-led commission to investigate allegations against bishops. The Cupich-Wuerl plan would instead send allegations against bishops to be investigated by their metropolitan archbishops, along with archdiocesan review boards. Metropolitans themselves would be investigated by their senior suffragan bishops.
Sources in Rome and Washington, DC told CNA that
Wuerl and Cupich worked together on their alternative plan for weeks, and presented it to the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops before the U.S. bishops’ conference assembly in Baltimore. Cupich and Wuerl are both members of the Congregation for Bishops.
The Cupich-Wuerl plan was submitted to the U.S. bishops even after a Vatican directive was issued Monday barring U.S. bishops from voting on any abuse-related measures. The Vatican suspended USCCB policy-making on sexual abuse until after a February meeting involving the heads of bishops’ conferences from around the world.
An official at the Congregation for Bishops told CNA on Thursday that
the substance of the plan presented by Cupich at the Baltimore meeting is known in the congregation as “Wuerl’s plan.” The official would not confirm whether the congregation had received an advance copy of the document.
Senior chancery officials in Washington described the plan presented Tuesday as a collaborative effort by the cardinals, telling CNA that
Wuerl and Cupich first informed the Congregation for Bishops several weeks ago about their idea for the “metropolitan model” to handle complaints against a bishop, and suggested they had continued to discuss the plan with Congregation officials since that time.
"It was a mutual effort," one Archdiocese of Washington official told CNA.
The idea of amending USCCB policy so that allegations against a bishop would be handled by his metropolitan archbishop was first suggested by Wuerl publicly in August.
While Cupich played an active role in conference sessions this week, and proposed the detailed plan for an alternative to the conference’s special commission, Wuerl did not make any public comment on the plan, which at least some in Rome consider to be “his,” and which he first suggested in public 3 months ago.
Sources familiar with the behind-the-scenes discussions in Baltimore told CNA that Wuerl chose to step back from the plan’s presentation, providing advice and counsel but not seeking to take public credit. A spokesman for Wuerl declined to comment on that decision.
Several bishops in Baltimore told CNA that
Cupich appeared to be positioning himself as an unofficial but influential policy-maker in the conference. His status would be strengthened if the plan he introduced in Baltimore gained support in Rome, they said, especially if it were favored over the plan proposed by conference officials.
It is not clear to what extent Cupich considered how the manner in which he presented his plan could be interpreted. A spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Chicago told CNA that Cardinal Cupich was away, and could not be reached for comment.
A source familiar with the drafting of the alternative proposal told CNA that Wuerl was not involved in the way the plan was presented in Baltimore, saying that Wuerl’s only concern was developing the best possible plan for tackling the sexual abuse crisis, and not “playing games” at the conference.
Many American bishops arrived in Baltimore this week expecting to approve the proposed the independent commission, along with proposed standards for episcopal conduct. Bishops were stunned to discover Monday that they could not vote on the measures, following the last-minute instruction from the Congregation for Bishops, received Sunday night by conference president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo.
An Archdiocese of Washington official suggested to CNA that
the Congregation for Bishops’ last minute suspension of voting at the Baltimore meeting might have been because the conference’s independent commission proposal was not sent to Rome until Oct. 30.
DiNardo, however, told a press conference Monday that while the draft document for the independent commission had been sent to Rome at the end of October, the USCCB had been in consistent contact with Vatican officials as the texts were developed.
DiNardo said that “When we were in Rome [in October] we consulted with all of [the Vatican dicasteries]. I mean, [that’s what] we do.”
“When I met with the Holy Father in October, the Holy Father was very positive in a general way - he had not seen everything yet - of the kind of action items we were looking to do.”
Cupich spoke from the floor immediately after DiNardo’s announcement of the change Monday morning. The cardinal suggested that the bishops continue to discuss the proposed measures and take non-binding votes on them. He offered no indication at that time that he would introduce a completely different plan.
By Tuesday afternoon,
the Chicago cardinal rose to question the premise of the USCCB’s proposed independent commission, asking if it was a reflection of sound ecclesiology. Cupich suggested that the commission could be seen as a way of “outsourcing” difficult situations.
Shortly thereafter, Cupich submitted to conference leaders a seemingly well-prepared and comprehensive “Supplement to the [USCCB] Essential Norms,” which outlined in detail the plan he had developed with Wuerl.
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia said from the floor that the “metropolitan model” appeared to align closer with the Church’s hierarchical structure.
“I really do favor the use of the metropolitan and the metropolitan review board for these cases… but that would require that the Holy See give metropolitan archbishops more authority than we have,” Chaput told the conference.
Chaput told the bishop that the reason the USCCB executive committee opted to pursue the idea of an independent commission instead of developing a plan based around the metropolitan archbishop was because they did not think the “metropolitan model’ would have support in Rome.
“When we discussed this at the executive committee level we, some people, thought it would be easier for us to develop this independent commission than to get the Church to change canon law,” he said. [Chaput appears to forget that Bergoglio could easily do that with the snap of a finger if he had to because it suited him, just as he changed the Catechism's teaching on the death penalty.]
Sources close to the USCCB told CNA that if the executive committee had known the Vatican might support the “metropolitan model,” it might have been pursued earlier, with a proposal being circulated to members by the conference leadership. A spokesperson for the USCCB declined to comment on that possibility.
Cupich had suggested during the meeting that either or both plans could be voted on in non-binding resolutions in order to give the Vatican a sense of the American episcopate’s desires. Ultimately, no vote was taken.
Instead, as the Baltimore meeting ended, DiNardo agreed that Cupich’s plan would be developed alongside the independent commission plan, by a special task force consisting of former USCCB presidents Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, and Archbishop Wilton Gregory. DiNardo will have the option of presenting either or both possibilities when he and conference vice president Archbishop Jose Gomez attend the Vatican’s February meeting.
USCCB spokespersons declined several times to comment on any role Cupich or Wuerl, members of the Congregation for Bishops, might have played in developing the congregation’s reaction to the special commission plan.
Editorial note: This story was updated after publication to explain that metropolitans under investigation would be investigated by their senior suffragan bishops.
Making sense of the USCCB
fall assembly and its aftermath
If the bishops cannot break their thrall to their umbrella organization,
and their paralysis within the warped culture of cronyism fostered by that structure
under the more general rubric of collegiality, it will likely be their undoing.
by Christopher R. Altieri
November 18, 2018
In the wake of reports that the intrusion of the Holy See on the proceedings of the USCCB fall meeting in Baltimore was even more extensive than previously understood, and that the Holy See’s intrusion involved high-ranking members of the Conference in its organization and execution, frustration and outrage has increased across broad quarters of the Catholic body. Some of that frustration and outrage will inevitably result in railing and denunciation, but this moment in the life of the Church and in the US theater of the global crisis calls for cold analysis.
“Wuerl’s plan”
The Archbishop-emeritus of Washington, DC (who is the current apostolic administrator of the same), Cardinal Donald W. Wuerl, and the current Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Blase Cupich, are the two US members of the Congregation for Bishops. That Congregation was directly responsible for conveying the “request” to USCCB leadership, that the bishops refrain from voting on reform measures at their Fall Meeting.
On Friday, Catholic News Agency reported that Cardinal Wuerl and Cardinal Cupich collaborated extensively on a proposal presented to the bishops as an alternative to the proposals on which the Holy See instructed them not to vote.
“Wuerl’s plan,” as CNA reports it was known in the Congregation for Bishops, would have seen allegations of episcopal misconduct sent to the metropolitan archbishop, and eventually to archdiocesan review boards, with accusations against metropolitans being investigated by the senior bishops of the metropolitan’s own ecclesiastical province.
Basically, bishops would investigate bishops under the Wuerl-Cupich plan, with underlings investigating their bosses in case of accusation against metropolitan archbishops. And two men who are known to be the Pope’s men, each with ties to Uncle Ted McCarrick, are the architects of the proposal.
The US bishops gathered for their Fall Meeting did not take even a straw vote on either their original proposals, or the Wuerl-Cupich alternative, though Cardinal DiNardo did agree to appoint a task force comprised of former USCCB presidents — Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, and Archbishop Wilton Gregory — to develop both sets of options and give them to DiNardo to present at the meeting of the leadership of the world’s bishops’ conferences scheduled for February 21-24 in the Vatican.
The optics are very bad.
Viewed from any vantage point, the collapse of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops beneath the weight of its members’ corruption, cowardice, and incompetence is an awful thing. That circumstances, at least, make it appear quite possibly to have been aided by two men already tainted by the crisis, who also are known to be “in” with Pope Francis, does nothing to improve appearances.
It will take a good deal of feeling around to get it, but we start well by skipping debate over optics:
Pope Francis did this thing.
When it comes to the leadership of the USCCB, and their ability to guide the ship through the troubled waters in which she finds herself, Pope Francis has given what is in essence an unequivocal vote of no confidence:
- He made the Conference leadership wait nearly a month for a meeting in which to make their formal request for an investigation into the rise of the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington, DC, Theodore Edgar “Uncle Ted” McCarrick;
- He rejected their request for an investigation;
- He suggested they skip their Fall Meeting entirely and hold a spiritual retreat in lieu of it;
- He “requested” they not vote on their reform proposals, even as he allowed two other major national conferences — France and Italy — to adopt their own measures.
As if in order to remove any doubt, the Apostolic Nuncio to the US, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, said in his remarks to the bishops,
“If we are together, in real hierarchical communion — hierarchical communion that permeates our hearts and are not merely words — we become the visible sign of peace, unity, and love, a sign of true synodality.” We all know who is at the head of that hierarchical communion. At this point, it should be clear that “true synodality” is whatever that chief hierarch says it is.
Archbishop Pierre also said, “As said from the time of diplomacy in the Greek City-States, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’ (And, as a Nuncio, I can assure you it is a phrase very dear to me!)” Archbishop Pierre was in the quoted passage from his address speaking specifically to the role of the media in highlighting the failures of the bishops. Nevertheless, the message was clear:
everyone in that room knew whose messenger Pierre is.
Cardinal DiNardo’s attempt to place responsibility for the thing at the door to the Congregation for Bishops is not likely to convince anyone. “We are Roman Catholic bishops, in communion with our Holy Father in Rome,” DiNardo told reporters on Monday afternoon. “He has people around him who are what we call congregations or offices, and we’re responsible to them, in that communion of faith,” he added.
Legal ramifications
In any case, the intrusion of the Holy See on the proceedings in Baltimore may have created more trouble than Francis wanted. Plaintiffs on Tuesday of last week filed a lawsuit in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, naming both the USCCB and the Holy See as defendants in the civil RICO complaint.
The Holy See has shielded itself — thus far successfully — from civil liability related to abuse, by arguing that bishops are not employees or officials of the Holy See. If the bishops are thus beholden not only to the Pope but to his central governing apparatus, it stands to reason that a lawyer might ask a court to take a closer look at the nuts and bolts of the bishops’ relationship to Rome.
The US bishops’ acquiescence to the Pope’s “request” for a delay — it could be argued — is just the sort of thing that gets the camel’s nose under the tent. Mitchell Garabedian, a Boston-based attorney who has been representing victims of clerical sexual abuse since the early 2000s, told CWR,
“Even if the Holy See framed their order as a request, the key point is that the bishops abided by it. It tends to show a nexus of oversight.”
Garabedian also told CWR,
“If the Holy See ordered the bishops not to vote on the policy measures, that would weaken the Holy See’s claim that the bishops aren’t agents of the Holy See.”
Here the legalities become complex, and depend largely on how judges decide to parse and apply standards of exception to sovereign immunity articulated in 28 USC 1605. Suffice it to say for the moment that the Holy See’s action, and the US bishops’ response, may have made the situation more complicated.
Bishop Christopher Coyne suggested the delay could have a salutary effect. “We in the U.S. can have a limited view of the worldwide church,” Coyne told The Washington Post, also on Monday afternoon. “It would be difficult if we came up with [different] policies and procedures,” the Post also quotes him as saying. Why that would be difficult at all, and why any eventual difficulties in that line should be insurmountable, are things Bishop Coyne left unexplored.
Ecclesial geometry
How that squares with Pope Francis’s view of the Church as a polyhedron, is not entirely clear. “[O]ur model [for the Church] is not the sphere, which is no greater than its parts, where every point is equidistant from the center, and there are no differences between them,” Pope Francis writes in paragraph 236 of Evangelii gaudium. “Instead,” he continues, “it is the polyhedron, which reflects the convergence of all its parts, each of which preserves its distinctiveness.”
We know Francis allowed the French bishops to vote on reform measures last week, which included an independent investigation of their conduct with respect to clerical abuse since 1950. We also know he allowed the Italian bishops to vote on their own safeguarding measures at an extraordinary plenary that took place at the Vatican and roughly in concurrence with the US bishops’ gathering in Baltimore.
Neither the Pope, nor the bishops, can have it both ways: which is it going to be?
Most of the drama played in the first ten working minutes of the first public session on Monday morning, when USCCB President Daniel Cardinal DiNardo — who faces his own difficulties in his See of Galveston-Houston — announced that Rome had “requested” the bishops not vote on measures designed to protect the young and the vulnerable from the predations of evil bishops and secure a measure of episcopal accountability with regard to their duties of oversight and governance.
Three days of mostly scripted theatre ensued. The various interventions made and positions staked are amply documented, and require no rehearsal here. They terminated in a vote on the following measure:
Regarding the ongoing investigation of the Holy See into the case of Archbishop McCarrick, be it resolved that the bishops of the USCCB encourage the Holy See to release soon all documentation that can be released consistent with canon and civil law regarding the allegations of misconduct against Archbishop McCarrick.
In case the reader has not heard by now, the bishops punted. Perhaps more closely, but still in the sporting metaphor, they called a play on fourth down, then snapped the ball, and took a knee.
The vote was 83-137, with three abstentions. They could not bring themselves to ask the Holy See to share the documents it uncovers during its unsupervised internal audit of its own McCarrick files.
If the bishops cannot break their thrall to their umbrella organization, and their paralysis within the warped culture of cronyism fostered from top to bottom in that structure, all under the more general rubric of collegiality, it will likely be their undoing. It may already have been.
Voices raised
It is true that, from the floor, a few bishops noted the cultural rot. Bishop Stephen Biegler of Cheyenne addressed what he called a culture of “toxic brotherhood” fostered under the guise of collegiality:
Some bishops fostered a “toxic brotherhood” which caused them to overlook questionable behavior, ignore rumors of problems, believe clerical denials and seek to preserve a cleric’s ability to minister. At times, they acted to protect the reputation of the Church or clergy, while they shunned the victims/survivors of sexual abuse and their families. Bishops frequently ignored the voices of the laity who spoke up about sexual abuse and the mishandling of allegations; instead, they acted within institutional isolation.
That is all true. The problem with the statement is that it employed the wrong verb tense. There was plenty of each index of toxicity on display during the three days’ deliberations in Baltimore. None was more egregious than the speech of the Archbishop-emeritus of Los Angeles, Roger Cardinal Mahony.
It was beyond farcical to hear the bishops wonder aloud how they would have treated Uncle Ted if he had dared show his face at the meeting, when they welcomed Mahony and gave him a respectful hearing.
Bishop Shawn McKnight has received praise for some forceful words he spoke on the sidelines of the Baltimore meeting, and others he wrote in the wake of it.
“At the time of this writing, there has not been one bishop, archbishop or cardinal in either the Holy See or the United States who has come forward on his own to repent publicly of his sins of omission or commission with regard to Archbishop McCarrick’s series of promotions over decades,” wrote McKnight — who was consecrated and installed in his See of Jefferson City, Missouri, only this past February — in a letter to the faithful of his diocese, which he posted to his diocesan website after returning from Baltimore.
“Please, be men, not cowards, and come clean on your own!” McKnight exhorted his brethren in a letter not addressed to them, a letter written from his own See, to which he had just returned after several days in the bishops’ company.
“There doesn’t have to be a formal and long, drawn out investigation,” McKnight also noted in the letter, “for a bishop to exercise a little compunction and concern for the well-being of the whole Church.”
Lack of will
Awful as l’Affaire McCarrick doubtless is, McCarrick is only the worst of the lot — the worst we know of, at any rate.
Bishop Richard Malone of Buffalo sat with the other bishops, and received not a single call from the floor to answer for himself, though he is credibly accused of grossly mishandling several cases in his diocese.
The head of the US Bishops’ National Review Board, Francesco Cesareo — a layman and president of Assumption College in Worcester, Ma. — told the bishops,
“While much of the guilt has been placed on priests, bishops have often escaped punishment.” He went on to say, “As more information is publicized regarding the inappropriate handling of abuse by bishops, it remains clear that some bishops have escaped the consequences of their acts of omission regarding abuse, and that little is being done to address this injustice.”
The problem is not a want of information at this point, but a lack of will.
The Bishops of the Missouri Province wrote a blunt, direct letter to Bishop Timothy L. Doherty of Lafayette, Indiana, who is Chairman of the US Bishops’ Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People. Their letter was dated October 6th. They made it public on November 12th, after the Holy See spiked the US Bishops’ proposals.
“The McCarrick scandal has shaken not only the confidence of Catholics,” the Missouri bishops wrote, “but also of others who look to our Church for moral guidance.” They went on to say, “It is our moral obligation to acknowledge the negative consequences of a pastoral strategy of silence and inaction in the face of such a horrific scandal that is so widely known.”
“The very credibility of the Church has already been seriously damaged by a persistent silence and inaction over many decades,” the Missouri bishops said — and they are not wrong.
Morality and monsters
Nevertheless, the almost exclusive focus on the corporate moral obligation of all the bishops together elides the duty of each bishop toward the same.
- So long as the bishops insist on acting only or even primarily as a body, the bishops deserve — in justice — to be judged according to the worst of their lot.
- The worst of their lot are monsters, though there is still a general clerical unwillingness to admit even that.
.
The president of the University of Notre Dame, Fr. John Jenkins, CSC, drew significant flak last week for some comments he made regarding Uncle Ted McCarrick specifically, and the broad crisis, generally. In an exclusive interview with Crux, he said,
“There’s a tendency, and I don’t think it’s a helpful tendency in this kind of situation, to turn the perpetrators into monsters.” Jenkins went on to say,
“[The tendency is] just to imagine that they are thoroughly corrupt people, but the problem is that it’s not true. It’s a part of their lives that is deeply problematic, but another part that is not.”
“That’s why it’s so hard to identify the problem,” Fr. Jenkins added, “and sometimes, that person doesn’t seem to see the problem.”
[OH, BULLSHIT! Guilty persons generally inhabit a world of denial. They know they are doing wrong, but cannot and will not admit it.]s
Fr. Jenkins’ line reminded me of a conversation many years ago — a typical newsroom shop session — in which we were talking about the classification of Hamas as a terrorist organization. “Well, it seems pretty straightforward to me,” I said roughly, “they kill civilians on purpose and break things to make a political point.” One of my interlocutors responded, roughly, “It’s more complicated than that,” adding, “they run maternity clinics and distribute medicine, baby formula, and the like.” I responded, “There’s nothing complicated about that: Hamas are terrorists who run maternity clinics and distribute medicine, baby formula, and the like.”
Many of us expect our devils to appear as great cloven-hoofed beasts: mouths dripping, tails lashing, pitchforks poised.
In reality, the Devil appears most often and most dangerously as “a man of wealth and taste”: a “lover” of exquisite things and a “friend” who is a fixer; a gregarious chap, at once familiar and powerful. The devil, in short, looks like Uncle Ted McCarrick. [But someone else more prominent comes more quickly to mind! And I don't mean Donald Trump.]
When he finds himself up a tree, he will adopt all sorts of guises. Most often, though, he will feign ineptitude and attempt to lull those who have treed him into complacency, if not to elicit their pity. The devil, in short, often looks like Ted McCarrick — and when he’s in a bind, he looks and acts like Verbal Kint.