Sex-Abuse Scandal Growing Faster Than the Church Can Contain It

Interestingly, as the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh are roiling Washington, the Catholic Church sexual abuse scandal is exploding at new levels.  In both instances, the behavior of the alleged predators is part and parcel with a sense of entitlement and being above the law. On the one hand you have rich boy, private prep school boy Brett Kavanaugh and on the other you have priests and bishops - princes of the Church, if you will - who may no longer live in palaces as the once did in France and the United Kingdom where I recently visited, yet who see themselves as free from the rules that bind others.  In the case of the GOP, it has already given Trump a pass on serial cases of sexual harassment.  In the case of the Catholic Church, the Church hierarchy has covered up crimes against  children and youths and for decades, if not centuries.  Now, the Catholic Church is facing a reckoning that has put even Pope Francis in the bull's eye.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the long overdue accounting facing the Church.  Here are highlights:

As Pope Francis faces mounting pressure to address the spiraling clergy sex-abuse crisis, almost every day has brought some new revelation or declaration.  

Since Tuesday alone, a group of American Catholic leaders went to Rome to ask Francis some tough questions, while a women’s open letter demanding answers from him crossed the 45,000-signature mark. The pontiff summoned bishops from around the world to a future meeting, while making one bishop the subject of a new investigation. One cardinal who had come under fire for allegedly enabling accused priests to keep working for the Church announced his plans to resign, while another, who has been pressing for meaningful action against abusers, came under scrutiny himself. Amidst all this, a bombshell report about sex abuse in Germany was leaked to the press.

It does seem like we are reaching a watershed moment.” By Thursday, there had been so many new developments that she said she was having a hard time keeping up—and that the leaders at the Vatican probably were, too.  “I think they’re scrambling. The news is coming on so many fronts. I think they don’t know quite what to do.” Here is some of what they nevertheless did this week.

An American audience with the pope

Church leaders from the U.S. met with the pope in Rome on Thursday. Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, had called for a meeting to discuss allegations against Theodore McCarrick, a former cardinal who served as archbishop of Washington from 2001 to 2006. This summer, McCarrick resigned as cardinal after he was accused of sexual abuse.

But if any concrete decisions came out of the papal meeting, DiNardo did not reveal them.  “I worry that the cardinals are coming home empty-handed. They were listened to, but it’s not clear they’re going to have support from the Vatican in terms of handling the investigation into the McCarrick situation,” Mary Rice Hasson, the director of the Catholic Women’s Forum, a network that aims to amplify the voices of Catholic women, told me Thursday. “The concern doesn’t go away because our cardinals had a nice listening session with Pope Francis. People want action.”

Complicating matters further, on the eve of his meeting with the pope, DiNardo himself was accused of covering up abuse in his Galveston-Houston archdiocese, casting doubt on whether he could effectively lead the U.S. Church’s effort at reform, the Washington Post reported.  

Even as DiNardo and other U.S. leaders gathered in Rome on Thursday, the pope accepted the immediate resignation of a West Virginia bishop, Michael J. Bransfield, over allegations that he had sexually harassed adults. Francis also authorized another bishop to investigate the allegations against Bransfield.

A plan for an unprecedented meeting of world bishops

Pope Francis on Wednesday summoned bishops from around the world to a first-of-its-kind meeting in Rome in February. The focus will be on protecting minors, and bishops will reportedly receive training in identifying abuse, intervening, and listening to victims.

The choice to summon the presidents of bishops’ conferences worldwide signals that the Vatican finally recognizes clergy sex abuse is a global problem, according to Cummings, the historian.  . . . In the past, she explained, Church leaders had suggested that the problem was limited to the U.S., but as scandals began to surface elsewhere—from Ireland to Australia to Chile to Germany—that story became impossible to believe.

Stephen Schneck, a former Catholic University professor, likewise told me, “I’ve come to the conclusion that the bishops can’t be trusted to police themselves. I think the ultimate solution, especially here in the U.S., is going to require an active, permanent role for the laity, because of the problem of oversight.”

A new bombshell report

A study has alleged that more than 3,600 children were sexually abused at the hands of some 1,670 clergy members over the past seven decades in Germany. Commissioned by Church officials and conducted by university researchers, the report was supposed to be released on September 25, but it was leaked to German outlets Spiegel Online and Die Zeit and reported this Wednesday instead.

This study comes on the heels of another bombshell report. Just last month, a 900-page Pennsylvania grand-jury report detailed accusations against about 300 priests and alleged that their actions—which the report said involved more than 1,000 children—were covered up by diocese officials.

A cardinal on the verge of resignation

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, said Tuesday that he plans to travel to Rome soon, where he will ask the pope to accept his resignation. Wuerl has been heavily criticized after the Pennsylvania grand-jury report alleged that, as archbishop of Pittsburgh from 1988 to 2006, he had permitted priests accused of abusing minors to be reassigned or reinstated. He said Thursday that new leadership is needed to help the Washington archdiocese get past the “current confusion, disappointment, and disunity.”

A very vulnerable pope

In an ambiguous homily on Tuesday, Francis seemed to suggest that Satan was playing a role in the uncovering of the Church’s sex-abuse scandal. “In these times, it seems like the ‘Great Accuser’ [a biblical name for the devil] has been unchained and has it in for bishops. … He tries to uncover the sins, so they are visible in order to scandalize the people,” he said.

Some Catholics I spoke to speculated Francis may have been alluding to Viganò’s letter, which demanded the pope’s resignation. Either way, it struck some as a discordant remark at a moment when many are seeking contrition and humility from the Vatican.  

The pope’s favorability has been plummeting in the U.S., among both Catholics and the general public. A year and a half ago, he enjoyed a 83 percent favorability rating among U.S. Catholics, but that’s dropped to 63 percent, according to CNN.

Hasson, who drafted a public letter—now signed by 45,000 women—demanding answers from the pope about what he knew and when, said that although she and the other signatories love the Church, they are angry that the pope has not been more forthcoming and transparent. “The Church itself needs to get serious about spiritual integrity,” she said. “People are now praying for the Church.”

 If one wants the Church to reform itself and belatedly remove bishops and cardinals who turned a blind eye to sexual abuse, the best way to do so is to (i) have parishioners cease financial support to the Church and let pastors and bishops know why the funds are being cut off, and (ii) better yet, walk away from the Church and, again, let it be known why you are leaving.  Throughout history, only a lose of membership combined with a precipitous drop in financial support have forced the Church to change.  These forces need to be brought to bear again.

Pope Francis Could Save the Church. Will He?

I gave up on Catholicism back around 2000, even before I ultimately came out of the closet.  I was sickened by the homophobia of the institutional Catholic Church and its desperate clinging to 12th century knowledge.  So I became an Episcopalian.  Ultimately, through a fluke, I ended up switching to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ("ELCA"), the liberal version of Lutheranism.   When the sex abuse scandal exploded in Boston in 2002, I felt my decision to leave Catholicism was the correct move given the moral bankruptcy of the Church leadership all the way up to John Paul II.  For a time, some family members remained in the Church, but now, most have left as well, some moving to the ELCA, many of the younger ones simply walking away from religion as has been the case with so many Millennials.   With the damning revelations of the Pennsylvania grand jury report - I suspect a similar investigation in other states would reveal similar findings - many Catholics are likely pondering whether it isn't finally time for them to walk away in a realization that reform of the Church from within is most unlikely.  Only one man could change that equation if he wanted to do so.  As a column in the New York Times ponders, will Pope Francis defy the fossilized and utterly corrupt curia and hierarchy and make radical changes to save the institution.  Here are column highlights:

The Roman Catholic Church’s clergy sex abuse crisis has come roaring back to life as if it were the worst days of 2002, when the scandal tsunami out of Boston seemed to inundate the entire church.

The shock waves this time came from substantiated allegations that a well-known cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, a retired archbishop of Washington, had molested boys; he was forced to resign last month from the College of Cardinals. Then came the grand jury report out of Pennsylvania detailing 70 years of horrific abuse by some 300 priests, too much of it facilitated by bishops.

It has all landed on the desk of the current pope, and the scandals have the potential to undermine the Francis pontificate.

It shouldn’t. Indeed, if Pope Francis lives up to his own words and actions, this could be a chance for him to advance his vision of church reform and turn a long-running crisis into an opportunity for long-term renewal.

This eruption was inevitable. At a historic meeting in Dallas in June 2002, American bishops agreed to a comprehensive set of policies designed to protect children and punish offending priests. . . . as the bishops effectively exempted themselves from genuine oversight or discipline for failing in their jobs, the sin that truly scandalized the faithful.

Only Rome could investigate bishops, they said, and only the pope could punish them. That wasn’t likely. The Vatican under John Paul II was not very keen on the United States hierarchy’s new policy against priests, and the pontiff certainly didn’t want to throw his own bishops under the bus.

Now the scandal has even some of John Paul’s staunchest fans questioning the wisdom of his canonization in 2014, and it bedeviled Pope Benedict up to his stunning 2013 resignation.

[I]n March 2013, Pope Francis — then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires — gave a brief, powerful address in which he said the church needed to open up or risk becoming “self-referential” and “sick” with “theological narcissism” that leads to the worst evil, the “spiritual worldliness” of an institution that is “living in itself, of itself, for itself.”

As pope, he has saved his harshest rhetoric for his fellow clerics, especially the cardinals and bishops, criticizing them as “careerists” and “airport bishops” who spend more time flying around the world than tending their flock.

“Clericalism is a perversion of the church,” Pope Francis told 70,000 young Italian Catholics at a rally this month. “The church without testimony is only smoke.”

Pope Francis’ vision of the church is clearly more radical than the defensive posture of John Paul or the nostalgic traditionalism of Benedict. But is he willing and able to implement it?

The pope has had spotty record on disciplining bishops and on the sex abuse issues as a whole, but a promising trajectory. For example, in 2015 he investigated and dismissed two American prelates, Bishop Robert Finn and Archbishop John Nienstedt, who had been accused of covering up for abusive priests. (Both men were favorites of conservative Catholics and found sanctuary elsewhere.) In 2014, Francis removed a conservative Paraguayan bishop who had sheltered an Argentine priest who had left the diocese of Scranton — yes, a diocese cited in last week’s grand jury report — under suspicion of sexual abuse.

Yet earlier this year, Pope Francis faced what had been the greatest crisis of his papacy when he firmly defended a Chilean bishop accused of covering for a notorious and influential priest who led a scandalous double life. Then in April, faced with evidence that the bishop, Juan Barros, and many other in that country’s hierarchy had in fact been complicit in the scandal, the pope suddenly reversed course, . . .

When Archbishop McCarrick was found to have molested minors as well as young men, the pope not only ordered the retired 88-year-old churchman confined to virtual house arrest but also accepted his resignation as a cardinal.

These are encouraging steps, but much more is needed: not only the kind of spiritual renewal that Pope Francis demands but also the kind of systematic change that can safeguard children and vulnerable adults, restore some credibility to the institutional church and begin to dismantle the culture of clericalism — the spiritual elitism of holier-than-thou cliques who cover for one another as they try to run the church.

Pope Francis has frequently been excoriated by church conservatives . . . . But on the issue of abuse, the Catholic right is often proving to be the pope’s unlikely ally, with many calling for a top-to-bottom overhaul.

It’s not like the church has to rewrite the creed. Instead, Catholicism can start by creating a human resources department to ensure that any person who is sexually harassed or assaulted — especially by a bishop or cardinal — can report it in confidentiality and safety.

It’s a simple first step, but even that would have been unthinkable under the ecclesiology of previous pontificates. Now such changes are both unavoidable and integral to the kind of humble, open church that Pope Francis desires. They also work. . . . and they will work for addressing the church’s two outstanding problems: protecting adults as well as minors, and holding accountable bishops who cover up for abuse as well as those who commit abuse.

“Test everything; retain what is good,” Saint Paul wrote to the Thessalonians nearly 2,000 years ago. It was good advice for the church back then, and it is even more relevant today.

I am not optimistic and continue to believe than only plunging membership figures and plunging revenues - America remains one of the largest financiers of the Vatican - will ultimately force change.   If you want the Church to change, the first step is to walk away.