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| Debbie Yohn, who was abused by Father Joseph Maskell, the subject of a Netflix series called The Keepers, holds a photo of herself as a child. Yohn and other abuse survivors are protesting at Catholic bishops' meeting in Baltimore on Tuesday. (Katherine Frey/The Washington Post) |
The Vatican edict that halted the U.S. bishops vote on proposals to deal with sexual abuse accusations is an example of a top down hierarchical model of governance that asserts papal authority over the bishops. No lay supervision will be tolerated by the Vatican or supported by the bishops mentioned in the article below because this would threaten patriarchy's medieval power structure.
While Pope Francis claims that ordaining women priests will lead to a reinforcement of clericalism, this recent Vatican intervention is an example of a top down assertion of ecclesial power, the elephant in the Church's living room.
What is needed is a new model of a renewed priestly ministry in a community of equals which includes women.
The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests offers an example of a circular model in our decision making. Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP, https://arcwp.org, sofiabmm@aol.com
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/11/15/heres-why-the-vatican-stopped-american-bishops-from-voting-on-sexual-abuse-responses/?utm_term=.26d40aaca240
On Sunday, the Vatican ordered U.S. bishops to stop considering proposals about how to respond when bishops are accused of sexual abuses. Those proposals were on this week’s agenda at the fall gathering of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops in Baltimore.
Why were the bishops considering action now? For several reasons. This summer, the Vatican removed retired Archbishop Theodore McCarrick from ministry after finding that allegations that he had sexually abused young men were credible. In August, the Pennsylvania attorney general released a grand jury report revealing extensive clerical sex abuse in the state, prompting several other state attorneys general to investigate church abuse records. The resulting public outcry put tremendous pressure on the bishops to act decisively.
What were the bishops going to do?
On Monday, the bishops planned to address a key gap in their response to clerical sex abuse: how to deal with allegations against bishops. The U.S. Roman Catholic Church had, in 2002, released a directive on best practices for reporting and responding to sex abuse, called the “Dallas Charter.” But it did not include rules for bishops.
The bishops’ Baltimore agenda, according to the Jesuit magazine America, included:
Approving new “Standards of Episcopal Conduct” for bishops, the creation of a new commission to handle allegations of abuse against bishops, and new protocols for bishops who are removed or who resign from office due to sexual misconduct with adults or minors.
Why did the Vatican halt the vote?
The many possible reasons all arise from the complicated dynamics of Catholic Church governance. For one, the church has come to see clerical sex abuse as a global issue, not a problem isolated in a few countries such as Ireland or the United States. The church has thus increasingly seen the need for a global solution. The Vatican might be hoping that a more united front will emerge from a February 2019 meeting of bishops that it has called on this issue.
The bishops’ proposals might also have run afoul of the clergy/laity distinction in the Catholic Church, as one proposal would assign a lay commission the authority to investigate allegations against bishops — which the Vatican may have considered as going too far. While many U.S. and European Catholics regularly call for lay people to be more directly involved in church governance, many Vatican leaders think the bishops themselves should oversee reforms.
But what is most likely is that the pope, and the pope alone, has the responsibility of overseeing the bishops. The Vatican would want to seriously scrutinize any proposals to dilute that papal authority. Some Catholic reporting outlets have suggested that Vatican insiders think the bishops’ proposals may violate church law or that the Vatican did not have enough time to review the proposals. Those suggest concerns about the pope’s primacy.
It’s also possible that the Vatican is trying to shift the bishops away from seeing new institutions as a solution to the crisis. Pope Francis tends to play down the importance of institutions; for instance, he argues in his letter Evangelii Gaudium that it is fruitless to create institutions without engendering “new convictions and attitudes.” The Vatican commission set up to investigate clergy sexual abuse has itself been criticized for controversy and inactivity. As one U.S. bishop noted, the pope could be asking the bishops to take greater account of the bishops’ own “need for personal conversion” that would lead them from “ecclesial power” to “true servant leadership.” In other words, Pope Francis may think the resolution will come through changes in attitudes, not only or primarily through new institutions.
[The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is trying to withdraw from Moscow’s control. The Kremlin is not happy.]
What does this say about the relationship between the Vatican and the U.S. bishops?
Throughout his papacy, Francis has advocated a “sound ‘decentralization’ ” of the church’s power, at two levels. First, he has increased the consultative role of cardinals and bishops in his governance as pope, an approach known as “collegiality.” The pope has even explored giving bishops more decision-making authority, particularly through meetings known as “synods.”
Second, the pope has advanced a notion of “synodality”: the idea that all of the church — parishioners along with priests and bishops — should be integral agents in its mission and governance. This pushes against the “clericalism” that values clergy more than lay people. Francis, for instance, included many young lay people in a recent meeting of bishops.
This complication raises expectations for the February meeting of bishops at the Vatican. But that meeting will not deliver a final decision. Its conclusions will probably be subject to review and debate by national conferences of bishops.
This delay also risks further loss of public trust in the Catholic Church. In January 2018, 45 percent of U.S. Catholics felt that Francis was doing a “good” or “excellent” job of handling the sex abuse crisis, according to the Pew Research Center, while 46 percent felt his performance was “only fair” or “poor.” By September 2018, after the devastating summer revelations, the approval rating had dropped to 31 percent and disapproval had risen to 62 percent. Already, activists are protesting the Vatican’s decision to halt the bishops’ deliberations. Francis remains popular, but this scandal may be starting to diminish that popularity.
Amid this uncertainty, one thing is clear. The relationship between the pope and the bishops will continue to play a large role in the Catholic response to those abuses.
Bill McCormick (@BMcCSJ) is an assistant professor of political science at Saint Louis University and works on religion and politics.
BALTIMORE -- The Vatican may have thrown into disarray American bishops' plans to vote this week on proposals to address the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse crisis. But on Tuesday it became clear that the bishops are far from united in their views about what actions to take, as well as their own culpability and the perceived role of homosexuality in the unfolding scandal.
In their first of two days of debate about the abuse proposals on Tuesday, many bishops advocated vigorously for empowering lay people to investigate and hold bishops to a new written standard of conduct — while others questioned the pitfalls of such investigations and some expressed skepticism about the necessity of holding the church’s leaders more accountable at all.
Bishop Robert Evans of Providence came to the microphone to defend the actions of bishops in past decades who returned abusive priests to ministry, acting on the advice of psychologists at the time. “Many bishops, I would say almost everyone, did the best they could according to the best lights of the time.”
Francesco Cesareo strongly objected to every suggestion that the bishops can do anything less than take massive action. More than 130 current bishops, “have been accused during their careers of failing to respond to sexual misconduct in their dioceses,” Cesareo said referencing investigations by the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Others have been accused of committing abuse. Few have faced real consequences. This must change.”
A major proposal of the bishops, to be funded with $500,000 from the dioceses, would create a commission to investigate misconduct by bishops — including three clergy and six non-clergy members, at least one of whom would be a religious sister and at least one of whom would be an abuse victim. Participation by the bishops in investigations would be voluntary, and the commission could only access evidence held by a bishop or his diocese if the bishop consents to it, Archbishop Allen Vigneron of Detroit told the conference.
Some bishops raised concerns about the plan, which they had been scheduled to vote on this week. “I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say some of us have our share of enemies out there, that an allegation could be brought forward that is motivated by something other than the truth,” Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Ore. said.
Another proposal that had been scheduled for a vote is a new code of conduct for the bishops, which some bishops bristled at, saying they’d signed up to adhere to a standard of conduct, including celibacy, when they became priests.
Others fretted about the prospect of telephone and online hotlines for reporting bishop misconduct, which the bishops have begun searching for a third-party vendor to operate. The company that takes the calls can report the complaints to law enforcement directly. If a lay commission is set up, the hotline could also funnel the complaints to that commission.
Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio of Brooklyn and Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco stood up to ask how the hotline will handle anonymous complaints.
“Sooner or later they need to disclose their identity. An anonymous complaint is not going to go anywhere, I think,” Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, the vice president of the U.S. bishops, responded.
Even if the caller is named, Bishop Donald Trautman, a retired leader of Erie, Pa., said he still opposes the hotline. “I think this proposal is very dangerous and unjust,” he said. He said he does not want accusations that have not been “proven” or “substantiated” reported to the apostolic nuncio, the Vatican’s ambassador in Washington.
Trautman, whose former diocese was one of the six investigated in the Pennsylvania grand jury report that drew new attention to sexual abuse in the church, established himself at the meeting as one of the loudest voices against further accountability measures of several sorts. Earlier in the day, after some praised state prosecutors and secular journalists who expose crimes committed by priests, Trautman went to the microphone to castigate both.
“We should not be so naive as to accept every government report, every attorney general report as completely accurate or honest,” he said. Then he said he wouldn’t trust either the Philadelphia Inquirer or the Boston Globe — who recently published a joint investigation into bishops' record on covering up sexual abuse — to publish accurate information. Some of the bishops applauded.
The Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops gave the American bishops an unexpected directive just as their meeting began on Monday, telling them not to take a formal vote on any of their sexual abuse proposals. The exact words used by the Vatican’s Congregation of Bishops in telling the Americans not to vote weren’t known Tuesday, but U.S. bishops' conference president Cardinal Daniel DiNardo said the halt was aimed at keeping unity in the global church on procedures.
John L. Allen Jr., editor of the Catholic site Crux, said there is a divide between the Vatican and the U.S. bishops about authority. Under church law, the only superior of a bishop is the pope, and anything otherwise “that would look like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops trying to assert authority over another bishop would be a problem,” Allen said. “Anything that looks like a lay board, or a lay entity that would assert authority over bishops would also be a problem.”
Outside advisory boards offered strong words for the bishops as they contemplated their plans.
“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,” Cesareo of the National Review Board said. He called for an investigation into allegations by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former papal nuncio to the United States, that Pope Francis and others in the Vatican long knew of the allegations against McCarrick and declined to act.
Cesareo criticized the bishops for hiding the extent of the abuse until civil authorities and journalists intervened. “How many souls have been lost because of this crisis?” he said. “Today the faithful and the clergy do not trust many of you. They are angry and frustrated, no longer satisfied with words and even with prayer. They seek action that signals a cultural change from the leadership of the church.”
The board presented the bishops with a list of recommendations, including one urging every diocese to review its archives, dating back to at least 1950, and to make the record of abuse found in those archives public.
Retired Army Col. Anita Raines, of the Conference’s National Advisory Council, said the council wants a code of conduct for bishops and a public recommitment to chastity and holiness. It also wants a third-party system to receive reports of abuse and auditing of U.S. seminaries “to investigate possible patterns of abuse of power and predatory homosexual behavior,” she said.
The explosive topic of homosexuality arose late Tuesday, with some bishops taking the microphone on the issue.
Bishop Joseph Strickland, of Tyler, Texas, said the McCarrick scandal should lead the bishops to consider the question of gay clergy. “It’s part of our deposit of faith that we believe homosexual activity is immoral,” he said. “Do we believe the doctrine of the Church or not?”
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