Pope takes action: Cardinals ordered to Vatican over scandal

Eight American cardinals, some of them under siege in the wake of the spiraling sexual abuse scandal, have been ordered to an extraordinary meeting with Pope John Paul II at the Vatican next week to discuss the exploding tempest.

``I can't think of anything exactly like it,'' said Avery Cardinal Dulles, a theologian at Fordham University in New York and one of the foremost authorities on Catholic church history. ``I don't remember any case where he's called the cardinals and bishops together (but) prompt action is needed at the present time to restore public confidence.''

Mitchell Garabedian, a lawyer representing victims of convicted former priest John Geoghan and other alleged clergy offenders, said the session shows how ``widespread'' the problem is in the United States. He said the meeting has also been encouraging for some victims.

``The recognition by the pope of sexual abuse by priests helps relieve some individuals of guilt and at the same time restores some dignity,'' he said.

David Clohessy, director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests (SNAP), said he and other victims were ``encouraged'' by the meeting but he was pessimistic that anything could come from it.

``We are encouraged that the Vatican is taking greater interest in this horrific problem,'' he said in a statement. ``It is hard to be hopeful about the meeting's outcome, however, since these same men are the ones who largely got us into this terrible situation.''

The meeting, with clerical sexual misconduct as the sole agenda item, will take place next Tuesday and Wednesday between the pope, Vatican officials and the eight U.S. archbishops, including Bernard Cardinal Law.

In addition to Law, the meeting will include Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua of Philadelphia, William Cardinal Keeler of Baltimore, Adam Cardinal Maida of Detroit, Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. of Chicago, Edward Cardinal Egan of New York and Theodore Cardinal McCarrick of Washington, D.C.

The top two officials from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops - Bishop Wilton Gregory, the president, and Bishop William Skylstad, the vice president - also will attend, conference spokeswoman Sister Mary Ann Walsh said.

Maida said in a statement that convening the princes of the church will be beneficial to the reeling hierarchy as the list of allegations and victims grows at a mind-numbing pace.

``Bringing together this level of Church leadership in Rome on this most serious issue is the right move at the right time,'' said Maida. ``So much is happening so fast in various dioceses around the United States and elsewhere, that I welcome this opportunity to be able to reflect and react in this collegial setting.''

The crisis has grown exponentially since the beginning of the year as new revelations pour out. In Boston, Law has gone into seclusion after announcing he was remaining as archbishop despite a thickening body of evidence that he shuffled several admitted pedophile priests around and gave letters commending them for their service to the archdiocese.

Egan is also facing a storm of criticism for his handling of accused clerics while he was archbishop in Connecticut, including an allegation that he covered up for a priest who fathered a child by a 14-year-old girl. Mahony is also coming under fire for similar allegations of covering up accusations against sexually abusive priests while he was in Stockton, Calif.

Sources told the Herald last week that Law, the most senior prelate in the United States, offered his resignation to the pope but was rebuffed because his ouster could lead to a domino effect that would force out others.

Stephen J. Pope, chairman of the theology department at Boston College, said the meeting is historical in its short notice and single agenda. In 1989, American bishops were summoned for a meeting on teachings contrary to church views and bishops from Holland were called to the carpet in 1981 for a similar incident.

Pope speculated the meeting could be about ``personnel issues'' such as Law's resignation and what it means for the Catholic church in the United States. He said normally cardinal conclaves have months of lead time for preparation and reflection.

Dulles is one of five American cardinals who were not invited, but he said the focus of the meeting is for those cardinals who actively oversee archdioceses to hammer out a uniform response to the widening scandal.

``American bishops want a little more ability to deal with the question than canon law gives them at this time,'' Dulles told the Herald in a telephone interview yesterday.

Dulles, who was elevated to cardinal last year and shares many of the pope's conservative philosophies on church teachings, said the scandal is an American media creation that does not rise to the level of historical church crises such as the Gregorian revolution in the 12th century or the Protestant reformation of the 16th century.

``I don't think this is anything of comparable proportions,'' he said. ``I don't think there's any great crisis in the U.S . . . It's really practically no news. To the extent it's a crisis, it's created by the news media. I suppose every individual case is terrible but it is not something peculiar to the Catholic church.''

BC's Pope called Dulles' observation ``stunning'' and said it could reflect John Paul's feelings, given the two share similar views.

``That is profoundly out of touch with what ordinary Catholics are thinking,'' said Pope. ``There's a very deep emotional level of anger and depression. If that's the way the Vatican is thinking, there's a very big problem.''

The Pope has already indicated his position on this issue, and by doing so I think he was blatantly indicating the direction he was telling the US hierarchy to take:

A spokesman for Pope John Paul II was quoted Sunday in The New York Times, reacting to child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Roman Catholic Church in New England. The pope's spokesman, Dr. Joaquin Navarro-Valls, focused his comments on gays, saying that "people with these inclinations just cannot be ordained."

Navarro-Valls also compared a gay man becoming a priest to a gay man marrying a woman while unaware that he is gay, according to the Times article. Just as such a marriage could be annulled as invalid, the ordination of a gay priest also might be considered invalid, Navarro-Valls was quoted as saying.

Obviously, the repeated refrain from the US hierarchy has been to deny the reality of this situation.

Bishop Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, has said that "This is not s homosexual problem."

This has been repeated by Cardinal Mahony as well as other bishops and priests across the USA, in lock-step unison with the refusal of the US media to point out the obvious, that the vast majority of these cases are cases of Chickenhawking.

I think this meeting will be to force the US hierarchy to address the root of the problem: The homosexuals in the priesthood and intransigence of the hierarchy in refusing to admit it, let alone deal with it.

From Chickens, hawks and sly old foxes

Make no mistake. What happened is a crime and justice demands to be served. What was done to these kids and their families was an attack on their humanity and a betrayal of the first order because of the cover of religion.

The men who perpetrated this abuse should burn in hell, but that's not our job. That comes later. Our responsibility is to prosecute. Find the men, prove them guilty and jail them. And by the way, that also applies to the hierarchy which in too many cases aided and abetted this criminal, homosexual abuse of children.

This isn't pedophilia – the abuse of young children – nor is it "sexual abuse" because very few girls are victims. Most of these cases involve prepubescent boys and teen-agers. No matter how you cut it, we're talking homosexual abuse.

The media are avoiding those words but you can't ignore it. The cascade of accusations and evidence is overwhelming. Religion mustn't protect crimes.

For too long, the "fox" (the hierarchy) has been guarding the "hen houses" (the parishes), protecting the "hawks" (the criminal priests).

Any farmer worth his salt, knows that's a prescription for disaster. And that's exactly what's hit the Church. God help us.

Maybe we ought to consider returning to the historic practice of popular election of bishops:

Outside of Rome, some things come clear, And one is growing crisis of leadership

Vatican Correspondent
jallen@natcath.org

The U.S. church is experiencing a leadership vacuum that, so far, no American prelate has been capable of filling.

I’m currently moving across the United States, lecturing with my colleague Robert Blair Kaiser of Newsweek, and speaking to groups of NCR readers in various cities. These sessions are a terrific opportunity to get back in touch with how American Catholics are thinking and feeling about issues in the church.

(The rarified air in Rome can cloud one’s perceptions. This became clear at my first appearance in New York, when I caught myself making casual references to the Apostolic Signatura and the Roman Rota as if they were the Yankees and the Mets. The blank faces told me I had been away too long).

The current scandals concerning sexual abuse by priests are, of course, much on people’s minds. As I talk with Catholics in various parts of the country, listening to their concerns and trying to think through the implications of their questions, it is becoming steadily more clear to me that we are facing two interlocking crises at once.

One concerns the sexual misconduct of a small number of priests. Some have tried to link this crisis to debates over clerical celibacy, women priests and homosexuality, though in each case I find the connection tenuous. These are worthy themes to discuss, but none of them explains sexual abuse, nor would proposed reforms in any of these areas solve the problem.

The other crisis is the administrative malfeasance of some bishops when accusations of abuse surface. Bishops have covered up the problem, paid the equivalent of hush money, and shuffled abuser priests from assignment to assignment long after they should have known better. This second crisis is not one of sexuality, but of leadership. It is not about theology, psychology or sexual maturity, but of how the managerial class in the church exercises authority, and to whom they are accountable.

In fairness, it should be noted that the failure to aggressively weed out abuser priests has been, in some cases, a vice born of excessive virtue. Reading through the documentation in Boston concerning Fr. Paul Shanley, one is struck by the lengths to which his supervisors went to give him second, third and fourth chances. They praised him for his positive contributions and struggled to find a place for him despite reservations about both his doctrinal views and his personal conduct. It was a kind of compassion, a desire to prop up a struggling member of the clerical club, that in its own way was commendable. Like all forms of tribal morality, however, its blindness was in failing to extend the same compassion and support to those outside the clerical ranks — above all, to those who claimed to have been abused by Shanley, and to those who might be abused by him in the future.

It would also be unfair to suggest that every American bishop has been deaf, dumb and blind in the teeth of the present crisis. Wilton Gregory, president of the U.S. bishops conference, set an example of plain talk, calling the failure of the Jefferson City, Mo., diocese to disclose past sexual abuse by the Rev. Anthony J. O’Connell before his promotion to bishop a “travesty.” Archbishop John Foley, an American who heads the Pontifical Council for Social Communications in Rome, has said bluntly that candor must drive the church’s response.

Yet these gestures, welcome as they are, have not been enough to restore public confidence. A Washington Post survey published April 7 revealed that 52 percent disapprove of the way church leaders have responded to the sex abuse crisis, with 45 percent “strongly” disapproving. A majority was either “dissatisfied” (34 percent) or “angry” (36 percent) over the church’s response.

The U.S. church is experiencing a leadership vacuum that, so far, no American prelate has been capable of filling.

In light of this situation, many Catholics are asking some very basic questions about how bishops are selected and held accountable. They wonder why these nominations are made in secret in Rome, why the local community doesn’t play more of a role in identifying its own leaders.

Under the current system, the papal nuncio is supposed to solicit input about potential nominees from the community, but how reliable this consultation is depends upon the nuncio. Sometimes the process works. Under Archbishop Jean Jadot, nuncio in the United States from 1973 to 1980, consultation was generally meaningful. Jadot would ask the interim administrator of a diocese to carry out extensive surveys of priests, deacons and laity, ranking the needs of the diocese and identifying men who could meet them. Based on this input, the quality of Jadot appointments tended to be high.

The fact that papal appointment of bishops can work, however, does not mean it has to work that way. A quick review of church history makes the point.

In the early church, three parties shared in the process: the laity of the local church, the clergy, and the bishops of the region. The third century text Apostolic Tradition by Hippolytus, for example, says that a bishop is to be chosen by “all the people” and that this selection is to be approved by assembled priests and bishops. Most bishops in the early Christian centuries were selected this way, such as St. Augustine.

In the Eastern church, this quasi-democratic process was gradually monopolized by the bishops of an ecclesiastical province, meeting in a body called a “synod.” The Orthodox still choose their bishops by the vote of a synod.

In the West, feudalism concentrated power to appoint bishops in the hands of secular lords. The investiture struggle launched by popes such as Gregory VII in the early Middle Ages was designed to secure the independence of local churches in naming bishops. As church historian Capuchin Fr. William Henn has pointed out, direct papal appointment actually runs counter to the Gregorian reform, which promoted the freedom of local churches in picking their own bishops. (A wonderful book for readers interested in the topic is Henn’s The Honor of My Brothers, from Crossroad).

By the time of the Council of Trent (1545-1563), three methods of selecting bishops were widely used in the West: nomination by the king or other secular authority, election by priests of a diocese, often in a gathering called a “cathedral chapter,” and papal appointment. Of the three forms, nomination by the secular government was by far the most common. While the pope retained a right to confirm the choice, this was largely pro-forma.

As late as the middle 1800s, direct papal appointment of diocesan bishops outside the papal states — territories in the middle of Italy ruled directly by the Vatican — were rare. In 1829, when Pope Leo XII died, there were 646 diocesan bishops in the Latin rite church; 555 had been appointed by the state, 67 elected by cathedral chapters, and only 24 appointed by the pope.

The infant U.S. church during this period observed the custom of clerical election of bishops. In 1789, Pius VI recognized John Carroll of Baltimore as the first American bishop, ratifying the vote of local clergy.

Would a return to the tradition of local selection of bishops promote greater accountability on matters such as the supervision of troubled priests? Arguably. In a church whose leadership class is conditioned to take the local community alongside Rome as its point of reference, there might well be more attention to local, not just papal, priorities.

Of course, in the context of the priest shortage, there is a shrinking talent pool from which to find bishops, and no method of selection is likely to produce perfect appointments. It is also true that local election of bishops in the ancient church sometimes led to gridlock, as various factions disagreed violently, and this could happen again. And, finally, it is true that in some places, direct papal appointment is the only guarantee of independence from governments hostile to the church (China is the most obvious case in point).

Despite this complexity, two points seem clear. One is that the debate over how to hold bishops accountable to their people will continue; I hear little else these days from American Catholics. I expect the momentum to restore a stronger local role in the nomination process will be considerable.

The other is that this debate poses no insuperable problems of doctrine or tradition. Church history offers multiple examples of how bishops have been selected, so it is a question of prudential judgment. On this issue, at least, Catholics can challenge the status quo without fear of theological reproach.

* * *

Last week I made reference to the Good Friday homily delivered in St. Peter’s Basilica by the preacher of the papal household, Capuchin Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa. A Capuchin friend wrote to point out that Cantalamessa’s homily can be found on-line at http://www.ofmcap.org/inglese/rc290302en.htm. I’m happy to recommend it.

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