UNITED STATES
Catholic World Report
June 14, 2015
Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
The news that Pope Francis is establishing a new tribunal within the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to discipline bishops over their handling of sexual offenses is very welcome news indeed. This, I happily confess, is one of several reforms to ecclesial structures I did not expect to see under this pope. I mistakenly pegged Francis early on as having little or no interest in ecclesiology.
Like many academics, I assumed that those who have not written some learned treatise about a particular topic are unlikely to take action on it. Francis has—as far as I know—never written anything about ecclesiology. Rather, it was Pope Benedict XVI who had been writing extensively on changes to Catholic ecclesial structures for forty years at the time of his election, and I fully expected to see many of those changes implemented by him as pope. But apart from the abortive decision in 2006 to abandon the title “Patriarch of the West,” very little happened. When he retired in 2013, I despaired that we had lost our best chance for this and other important reforms.
But it is another common academic and bureaucratic mistake to assume that writing about something is always the precursor to taking action on it. Francis, in fact, has repeatedly shown that one can act decisively and well without having written much if anything beforehand about matters. There are, so far, several actions he has taken in this short pontificate dealing with reform of ecclesial structures, but the most recent one is, to date, the most significant.
The creation of disciplinary mechanisms for bishops who failed in their duty to deal with sexual abuse is something I have written and lectured about in several places for nearly a decade now. In earlier works I attempted to show both that the synodal structures of the Orthodox Churches may have something to teach Catholics in this regard and, further, that extra-papal processes of election, discipline, and deposition of bad bishops are in fact anchored in centuries of Catholic history—as various historians such as Brian Daley, I.S. Robinson, Eamon Duffy, and Kathleen Cushing have shown.
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