Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo The Pope has raised the stakes for February’s Church summit on abuse, writes Christopher White
In the Oscar-winning film Spotlight, which chronicled the Boston Globe’s devastating reporting on the first wave of the clerical sex abuse crisis in the US, one of the reporters remarks that “the Catholic Church thinks in centuries”.
When Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), announced at the start of this month’s highly anticipated meeting that the Vatican had requested a delay in voting on new proposals for bishop accountability, the room – and by extension, faithful Catholics across America – were left stunned, with many thinking that it was, indeed, taking centuries for the Church to duly respond to the lingering crisis.
For the more than 300 bishops representing the country’s 195 Catholic dioceses, this meeting was supposed to serve as a turning point following a “summer of shame”, wherein one of the US Church’s most senior churchmen, Archbishop Theodore McCarrick, was stripped of his membership in the College of Cardinals after revelations of decades of sexual misconduct and abuse allegations.
The McCarrick gut punch was only compounded by a Pennsylvania grand jury report released in August chronicling seven decades of abuse of over 1,000 victims at the hands of more than 300 priests suspected of abusing.
The Pennsylvania report has triggered more than a dozen other states to announce similar investigations and rumors are swirling that the US soon will face a federal review, similar to that of Australia’s Royal Commission or Britain’s Independent Inquiry.
Motivations
One of the motivations for enacting new measures for bishop accountability is found in the refrain, “if we don’t get this right now, others will do it for us.” And while most bishops are sincerely motivated beyond the threat of years of state-led investigation and litigation, the sense that both the police and those in the pews are demanding action only upped the ante for last week’s annual meeting of US bishops.
Why then, so many wondered, did the Vatican put the kibosh on plans to move ahead with plans to establish new codes of bishop conduct and a special commission for investigating such claims?
The stated reason from the Vatican’s Congregation for Bishops was that the US needed to wait until after a summit on sex abuse in February in which Francis has summoned the heads of every bishops’ conference around the world to Rome so that US procedures can be in harmony with that of the global Church.
The announcement prompted even those considered very much a part of ‘Team Francis’ among the US bishops to wonder on Monday if, perhaps, the criticism of some of his detractors – that the Pope is tone-deaf on the issue of abuse – had its merits.
Those concerns were punctuated further by the fact that many Catholics are still seeking to understand why Francis had rebuffed the US bishops’ request in September for a Vatican-led investigation into McCarrick’s rise and fall from power, leaving many to consider whether Francis was simply out to teach a lesson to the US Catholic Church.
As the leadership of the USCCB began to salvage its agenda – noting they would move forward with an open discussion on the abuse crisis – a clearer picture began to emerge as to why the Vatican came out with such a heavy handed decree.
By the time open discussion began on the floor on Tuesday, what became clear was that the bishops were far from united in the proposals and that the two-thirds majority needed for passage was far from guaranteed.
Language
Concerns from ‘inexact’ language, to who was going to foot the US$500,000 bill for the new commission, to fear that bishops were merely outsourcing their responsibility were all raised.
During that same period, reports from Rome began to appear providing some insight into why the Vatican had canonical concerns with the proposals – most notably, that it put the laity on par with the Pope in the task of overseeing bishops.
What also seemed certain was that the Vatican was attempting to nudge the bishops toward some sort of introspective pastoral reflection about the role and responsibility of bishops.
When the bishops meet in Chicago this January for a weeklong spiritual retreat, prompted by Francis himself, the theme will be just that – a sign that many observers believe that Francis wants the solution to this crisis not just to come from a new commission or canonical revisions, but a change in culture.
By Wednesday, when the bishops concluded their open discussions, it was clear the two competing proposals had emerged: one which would rely on a new lay commission to investigate bishops and the other which would rely on the metropolitan bishops working in consultation with the already existing lay review boards to handle such investigations.
When Dr DiNardo summed up the meeting with a vow of “strongest possible actions at the earliest possible moment”, he did so not fully satisfying any of his constituencies – from the protestors outside demanding immediate action to the bishops heading home to face a restless flock.
Yet zooming out – in an effort to put last week’s meeting in a larger context – the very same centuries’ long thinking that frustrates so many Catholics over the pace of implementing new measures of accountability and governance, may turn out to also have its advantages.
While the stakes for an already high-pressure February summit have been exponentially heightened, so too are the hopes that it may provide an opportunity for a new global approach to the issue of clerical sexual abuse – one rooted in more than quick stop gap solutions, but one of enduring reform.
Even so, in an era of divisions within and outside of the Church, all parties will be united with eyes on that meeting to see if, in fact, it was worth the wait.
Christopher White is the national correspondent for Crux and The Tablet, the diocesan newspaper of the diocese of Brooklyn. Follow him on Twitter @CWWhite212.