UNITED STATES
The New York Times
JUNE 17, 2015
Ross Douthat
The conversation about Catholicism and Pope Francis is about to be dominated by the topics of the environment and climate change, thanks to tomorrow’s (official; there have been leaks) release of the pontiff’s ecological encyclical, Laudato Si. But let me sneak in a belated comment on last week’s news that the Vatican is setting up a tribunal to handle accusations of negligence by bishops in sex abuse cases, with coincided, probably not coincidentally, with the resignations of the archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul and his auxiliary over their handling of a now-defrocked predator priest.
When the Francis era began, I wrote a column and then a blog post arguing that nothing in his pontificate would matter nearly as much as the restoration of moral credibility, the lifting of scandal’s shadow, and that Bergoglio/Francis would be judged above all on whether he took concrete steps to bring accountability not only to abusive priests (where the church had taken most of the necessary steps under Benedict) but to those bishops and cardinals who protected them (where it conspicuously had not). I’m not sure if the sweep of my judgment quite holds up given all the other issues that this very active pontiff has stirred up or may stir up soon. But the basic point still holds: The reason the sex abuse issue was a crisis for the church rather than just a scandal was that it exposed systemic failures of governance within the Catholic hierarchy, systemic culpability on the part of the episcopate, and neither Rome nor the bishops themselves seemed to have any kind of response that wasn’t ad hoc, situational, and self-protective.
So for the sex abuse crisis to actually end, as opposed to just sort of gradually petering out as offending bishops aged and died and disappeared, something needed to be done to insure that nothing so systematic could happen again. And the mechanisms established under the last pope, while appropriate and admirable, were not sufficient to this task, because they only applied to abusive priests rather than encompassing the blindness and arrogance and fecklessness that kept those priests in the ministry.
Now, though, it seems like the church will finally have a mechanism fitted to those sins. Francis had already moved personally to remove a handful of bishops, but those moves probably personalized the process unduly, turning the pontiff into a kind of one-man supreme court, and inspiring talk of enemies’ lists among (mostly traditionalist) Catholics skeptical of his choice of targets. Such talk will accompany the operations of the tribunal, too, no doubt, but a formal process will at least minimize it, and hopefully lend some transparency to the path from complaints to resignations.
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