VATICAN CITY (VATICAN CITY)
Catholic World Report [San Francisco CA]
March 23, 2024
By Christopher R. Altieri
Pope Francis did not create the crisis of credibility or the failure of leadership culture that precipitated it, but he has not made either any better. In fact, his conduct of the office entrusted to him has made things very much worse.
Pope Francis has defrocked a Belgian bishop, 87-year-old Roger Vangheluwe, who is among the most notorious high-ranking clerics ever to face consequences for his perverse and criminal behavior.
Good, one might say, but the defrocking—more precisely the “reduction to the lay state”—highlights entrenched structural and cultural problems all centered for the moment on the reigning pope, Francis.
The Vangheluwe case in brief
Vangheluwe’s crimes began to come to light fourteen years ago. Benedict XVI let Vangheluwe go into early and honorable retirement, even though he had admitted to the sexual abuse of his own nephew over a period of several years.
Belgian criminal investigators declined to prosecute, but only because the crimes were statute-barred.
Roughly a year later, after Vangheluwe had spent some time in secluded retirement, the disgraced prelate admitted on Belgian television to the abuse of another nephew. Neither the Belgian authorities nor the Vatican took extra measures at the time of the second public admission.
At thirteen years’ remove from the second admission and—to hear official Vatican organs tell it—in light of “grave new elements” that came to the attention of the Vatican’s responsible department only relatively recently, Vangheluwe has received a new process, and the pope has penally laicized him.
That the new elements have emerged just as Pope Francis is planning a visit to Belgium, one threatened with disruption or outright cancellation by intense pressure from both the Belgian bishops and Belgian civil authorities including the parliament and the sitting prime minister, is a remarkable coincidence.
The Vangheluwe case in context
The case of Roger Vangheluwe—the history of its official management—is not unique. It recalls another episode from this pontificate and requires reference to still other episodes for proper contextual focus.
The Vangheluwe business, in short, is reminiscent of Francis’s extrajudicial defrocking, in 2018, of two Chilean bishops who had also been punished with honorable early retirement after their bad behavior came to the attention of the powers in the Vatican under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
2018, you may recall, was the year that saw Pope Francis come into ownership of the global abuse and coverup crisis. It was precisely owing to unscripted remarks Pope Francis made to a press gaggle outside a Mass venue in Iquique, Chile, that Pope Francis began to make the broader crisis his own.
That was the beginning of the global chapter in l’Affaire Barros, a festering crisis in Chile that had gone largely unremarked outside Latin America until Pope Francis visited the country. When the Barros business came to the attention of the global news media, the lid came up on a very nasty can of worms. Pope Francis sent his top investigator and eventually obtained the resignations en masse of the entire Chilean bishops’ bench, though he only accepted a few of them and spread his acceptances over time.
In October of 2018, after the heat of the Chilean crisis had not so much dissipated as shifted to other areas, particularly the United States, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis had reduced two Chilean bishops to the lay state.
One of the defrocked was Francisco José Cox Huneeus, then an 85-year-old man reportedly suffering from senile dementia. Cox had been bishop of La Serena, Chile, from 1990 to 1997. The other was 53-year-old Marco Antonio Órdenes Fernández, who served as bishop of Iquique from 2006 to 2012.
The allegations against Cox went back to the mid-1970s. The paper trail on Cox’s case makes pretty ghastly reading. Órdenes, on the other hand, had been a clerical star. In 2006, the then-42-year-old Órdenes became the youngest bishop in Chile’s history. He would retire a half-dozen years later, citing ill health.
(It bears mention that citing ill health was a tactic employed with some regularity to deal quietly with problem figures. One prominent case was that of Bishop Carlos Ximenes Felipe Belo SDB, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent resistance and advocacy amid the 1975–1999 Indonesian annexation and occupation of East Timor. Ximenes’ sudden and unexpected resignation went under the radar until a 2022 independent news investigation uncovered allegations dating to 2002, the year Ximenes resigned.)
Órdenes lived for several years what was by all appearances a quiet and secluded life of retrement. Cox, on the other hand, appears to have gone from place to place in search of somewhere to settle, which he eventually did at the General House of the Schönstatt movement to which he belongs. Another Chilean prelate even more high-ranking than Cox, Cardinal Francisco Javier Errázuriz (who happened to be Cox’s confrère in the Schönstatt fraternity and was also wrapped up in the Barros business) was of some assistance.
The cases of Cox and Órdenes are fascinating in their own right. You can read about them in Crux, which had the best presentation of their bones at the time the story broke.
Structural problems
The problem with Pope Francis’s handling of Cox and Órdenes wasn’t too much severity. The men deserved at least what they got from Francis. The problem was with how Francis used the power available to him. When there is a crisis of confidence in the ability of a government to deliver justice, an extrajudicial exercise of raw power to dispose of unfinished business is not the thing.
Pope Francis made naked use of power to dispose of Cox and Órdenes. It may have earned him a good day or two in the press, but it was a mere exercise of raw power brought to bear on convenient figures arbitrarily chosen (even if they were not targeted on a whim). Such use did nothing to address the structural problems that still afflict ecclesiastical justice.
With Vangheluwe, Pope Francis has used the organs of ordinary justice in the Church, only he did so by modes very much wanting in the one thing needful—transparency—and in the face of public pressure. Indeed, not only cynical observers note that Francis appears to have done what he has done because of the pressure he faced.
A system of justice entirely in thrall to an absolute ruler who not only holds but regularly wields supreme executive, legislative, and judicial power is not likely ever to inspire the confidence of the public in whose name it is supposed to work.
That the current modes and orders in the Church are lacking not only in the fact of transparency but the will to it only compounds a problem already intractable.
Cultural problems
The structural considerations of the problem shade perceptibly into those of the clerical and hierarchical leadership culture. It is said that politics is downstream of culture. It is also the case that the law is a teacher. Rather than dither over which comes first, it is time to recognize that politics and culture are functions of one another, and law is an expression of both.
Pope Francis did not create the rot in the Church’s leadership culture.
“[T]hese servants of a most merciful but sometimes severe God,” wrote the 19th century polemicist, Edmond About, in his work On the Roman Question, “simultaneously abuse both mercy and justice.”
“[F]ull of indulgence for the indifferent, for their friends, and for themselves,” About wrote, “they treat with extreme rigor whoever has had the misfortune to become obnoxious to power,” and “more readily pardon the wretch who cuts a man’s throat, than the imprudent citizen who blames an abuse.”
The popes in About’s day were temporal rulers as well as rulers of the Church, but his observations applied equally to both spheres and are still pertinent today.
“If occasionally officials of a certain rank are punished,” About wrote (introducing a discussion of the Campana Affair, a financial scandal and cause célèbre in its day that is still instructive), “if even the law is put in force against them with unusual vigor, rest assured the public interest has no part in the business: The real springs of action are to be sought elsewhere.”
The impression, shared by people across the whole spectrum of opinion in the Church, that motives other than the furtherance of justice—a public good—are at work in the Vangheluwe affair and many others, is not unique to the current pontificate but a longstanding feature of pontifical and ecclesiastical rule.
“Justice,” the saying goes, “must be seen to be done.”
Until there is a culture of transparency in the Church, no one—not clerics, not the laity, not the broad public—will be able to trust the clerical and hierarchical leadership, especially though not exclusively insofar as the administration of justice is concerned.
Said simply: Transparency is the key.
Until the clerical and hierarchical leadership of the Church get that right, there can be no reasonable hope of their getting responsibility and accountability right, either.
Personal problems
Pope Francis did not create the crisis of credibility or the failure of leadership culture that precipitated it, but he has not made either any better. In fact, his conduct of the office entrusted to him has made things very much worse.
Personal rule has been a hallmark of the Francis pontificate. He has preferred to rule outside the ordinary structures and organs of papal and ecclesiastical power even when he has not been pleased to govern by fiat. Autocratic turns are sometimes tolerable, especially when bureaucracy has become dysfunctional to the point of sclerosis, but the reform of the curia under Pope Francis has not led to a governing apparatus in form for action.
This has led to a situation in which not only this pontificate, but the papacy itself, is increasingly personalized. The papal office, in other words, is increasingly made after the image of the officeholder.
Inzoli, Ricca, Danneels, Barros, Errazuriz, Ezzati and Barbarin, Zanchetta, Ricard, and now Vangheluwe (all beneath the shadow of Rupnik), are names inextricably tied to the Francis pontificate. Francis’s legacy is indelibly signed by those names.
History will judge Pope Francis, but his successor will have to deal with the institutional wreckage left in his wake.
“Give him time,” urged Archbishop Charles Scicluna—the Church’s leading sex crimes investigator—in 2018, when Francis was reeling from the shock of outraged global public opinion as the crisis of abuse and coverup metastasized into worldwide scandal.
The gruesome litany tells of what he has done so far, with the time accorded him by providence.