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  When Local Control Fails

By Ross Douthat
The New York Times
April 6, 2010

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/when-local-control-fails/

Today’s priestly sex abuse story features a South Asian cleric accused of assaulting a teenage girl (and robbing his diocese into the bargain) while serving temporarily in Minnesota. He had already returned to India by the time the allegations surfaced, at which point the Minnesotan bishop wrote to the Vatican suggesting that the priest might need to be removed from ministry. The priest’s bishop in India, however, ordered him to undertake a year of prayer in a monastery, rather than seeking to have him defrocked, even as further accusations surfaced in Minnesota, and the county attorney began pursuing extradition. A Vatican spokesman says that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recommended laicization, but (per canon law) deferred to the Indian bishop on the matter. However, the documents suggest that at least initially, the C.D.F. only recommended that the priest be monitored and kept away from minors.

Got all that? Now here’s Rod Dreher, making an important point:

OK, look. There are over 400,000 Catholic priests on the planet. Do you know how many priests are on the staff of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has oversight in these matters? Something like 40. It is inevitable that the Vatican will have to rely on local bishops to attend to most of these matters. I can’t think of another church or religious organization that has comparable global reach, and which is centrally administered. I’m not trying to let the Vatican off the hook here, but I am trying to understand how difficult it is for the CDF to do proper oversight with such paltry resources …

Serious question: how is the Vatican, with its extremely limited resources, supposed to handle this problem? Again, I’m not trying to excuse Vatican inaction, but I don’t see how Rome is going to get a handle on this at the level of monitoring particular priests. The pope has to be able to trust local bishops to do the right thing.

Except that the events of recent decades indicate that the pope can’t trust them — not least because if and when local bishops foul up, the Vatican will inevitably be held responsible (by the media, and perhaps eventually even by the courts) for their crimes and blunders. Thus the great irony of the sex abuse scandal: It’s damaged Rome’s moral credibility immeasurably, but at the same time it’s leading to a Catholic future in which the Vatican actually expands its control over church administration.

Catholicism’s hierarchical culture notwithstanding, the church has never been nearly as centralized, nor the pope as powerful, as outsiders and critics often like to imagine. The pontiff appoints bishops and makes doctrinal pronouncements, but popes wrestle with their bureaucracies just like any politician, and the day-to-day administration of the church is almost completely localized. (The Vatican’s much-cited “crackdowns” on dissenters like Charles Curran and Leonardo Boff are well-publicized but also extraordinarily rare — not to mention frequently ineffectual.) This administrative localism, I suspect, is one of the many reasons why so many Rome-based cardinals spent so long downplaying the significance of the American sex scandals — because most of the disastrous decisions were being made in local dioceses, and the Vatican was largely kept out of the loop.

But now that era is over. As time goes by (and especially if the media drumbeat continues), the C.D.F. will probably acquire an ever-larger staff, to avoid accusations that laicization proceedings are taking too long, that abusive priests are still hanging around Catholic communities, that bishops in India (or wherever) aren’t handling abuse allegations appropriately, etc. Bishops, in turn, will become accustomed to punting more and more hard personnel decisions up the ladder, prompting further centralization in Rome, and so on.

All of this is understandable, given the gravity of the scandal, and it’s obviously preferable to the see-no-evil, pre-Pope Benedict status quo. But it means that far from becoming the more decentralized body that many of the current hierarchy’s critics claim to hope for, the post-scandal Catholic Church may end up more Rome-centric than ever.

The implications of this pattern — in which a crisis of authority leads to inexorably to greater centralization — extend well beyond Catholicism. Like many people on the right (and some on the left), I’m a great believer in the virtues of devolution, federalism and local control. Where the American future is concerned, I strongly associate myself with this argument from my erstwhile co-author, Reihan Salam.

… more broadly, this is my gut instinct about the American future: we will either rediscover our constitutional roots as a highly decentralized federal republic and revive our capacity for community self-help, or we’ll continue to evolve into a brittle, highly atomized society that looks to the center for increasingly expensive, intrusive, and unsustainable ways of meeting our wants.

But here’s the question: is real decentralization sustainable, given the centripetal forces of mass culture, mass media and mass politics? Once you’ve established that administration can be centralized, won’t any cascade of local blunders eventually get pinned, whether by the press or the public or the legal system, on some more central authority … which in turn will try to consolidate or re-consolidate its power, on the theory that if you’re going to get the blame, you might as well have the authority as well? And doesn’t this mean that any bold attempt at decentralization will only last until the next crisis — the next Hurricane Katrina, the next financial collapse, the next sex abuse scandal?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But so far, the experience of the Catholic Church doesn’t seem encouraging. The Vatican is likely to emerge from this crisis more unpopular with rank-and-file Catholics, and yet more administratively powerful than ever. Which, not coincidentally, is exactly what’s been happening to America’s ever-more-potent, ever-less-popular federal government for many, many years as well.

 
 

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