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First Things [New York NY]
October 30, 2025
By Michael J. Mazza
According to the latest study of U.S. Catholic priests, released in mid-October, there still exists a widespread and worrying lack of trust and confidence among diocesan priests regarding their bishops. Almost half (48 percent) reported a lack of trust in their own bishop, and nearly three-fourths (73 percent) of priests surveyed expressed a lack of confidence in the U.S. bishops in general.
One reason for this ongoing crisis of trust might be the most obvious: the pervasive fear that if and when a priest is ever accused of misconduct, he will be thrown under the proverbial bus rather than presumed innocent, given competent legal representation, and afforded due process. A similar survey three years ago had stated that “82% of priests regularly fear being falsely accused of sexual abuse.” There is no reason to assume that percentage has decreased over the last three years.
Quite the contrary. Even as the number of “substantiated” allegations of child sex abuse involving current minors (as opposed to abuse involving victims from decades prior) has plunged nationwide to near zero (seven in 2022, three in 2023, and only two in 2024, according to page 18 of the USCCB’s 2024 Annual Report), a disquieting phenomenon known as “Charter creep” has spread like a virus through the U.S. Church. When the nation’s Catholic bishops released the Dallas Charter in 2002, their focus was on quelling the raging scandal of clerical sex abuse of minors and the related mismanagement by church authorities. Justly proud of the subsequent advancements made in the prevention and detection of abuse, legal and compliance personnel in U.S. chanceries have now turned their gaze to many things other than the sex abuse of minors by clerics.
One of the most disconcerting trends is the scrutiny of past conduct, including sins from the distant past that were repented of and forgiven long ago. As a result, priests with spotless records of selfless service to the People of God are now being removed from ministry—and even publicly humiliated—based on reports from decades ago, before they entered seminary, some even dating back to their youth.
As a matter of canon and civil law, the alleged misconduct in these cases is not subject to criminal prosecution, either because procedural safeguards prohibit action on matters decades old, or because the allegations themselves do not involve criminal conduct (for example, the nebulous “boundary violation”). Yet in light of the current environment of virtue-signaling and political expediency, when the rule of law is deliberately neglected by those who should know better, ghosts from the past are allowed to destroy the lives of men who thought they could trust the Church to which they had given their lives. Such “Charter creep” is all the more problematic for an institution supposedly dedicated to the forgiveness of sin and reconciliation.
It is sometimes argued that in the interest of “protecting children,” no stone should go unturned, and—to paraphrase Barry Goldwater—“extremism in the prosecution of clerical child sex abuse is no vice.” Diocesan lawyers can argue that traditional principles of equity and due process, while noble in theory, have to be set aside “for the time being” so that negative publicity or financial liability may be avoided. After all, if the sins from a priest’s past are exposed, it might become an “embarrassment” for the Church—or, even worse, the diocesan insurance carrier might refuse to honor its liability coverage.
But observing the rule of law is most important when it is unpopular. Recall the words of Sen. Susan Collins, when she voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh as a Supreme Court Justice during his hotly contested nomination process in 2018: “In evaluating any given claim of misconduct we will be ill-served in the long run if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, tempting though it may be. We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy.”
In moments of moral panic, the only defense against the passions of mob rule is the calm insistence on rationality and justice. The obligation on the part of authority to follow the rule of law is just as important within the Church as it is for secular society. And what about the opportunity—let alone the duty—for the Church to teach in word and example about the power of God’s grace, of the forgiveness of sins, and of redemption?
To be sure, canon law does view certain acts as so problematic that they act as impediments to ordination. Canon 1041 of the 1983 Code addresses potential obstacles such as having cooperated in an abortion, attempting suicide, or suffering from debilitating psychological infirmity. Such factors raise serious red flags that must be addressed before anyone dares to submit himself to ordination. Not on that list of possible disqualifiers, however, are a whole range of behaviors that are endemic among today’s youth. Is the Church simply being naive here? Maybe in its zeal to recruit ministers, the Church is willing to overlook past misconduct? Shouldn’t the Church be more selective in its selection of ministers?
Interesting objections, certainly. But who among us wants to be defined by the worst thing he has ever done? Isn’t redemption possible? The Church, with two millennia of experience in the human condition, evidently believes so. Founded upon the rock of St. Peter, it cannot ordain only those men who are free from sin, even grievous sin. The seminaries, rectories, and chanceries would be very empty indeed if only the perfect could be ordained.
I am a civil and canon lawyer who often represents priests accused of misconduct. Thus I have firsthand knowledge of men who, notwithstanding several decades of faithful priestly service, are now out of work, out of ministry, and in some cases even have seen their names published on the internet as among those “credibly accused of child sexual abuse” (despite the Holy See’s disapproval of the practice). Wearing such a scarlet letter has life-altering consequences: They may not be allowed to live in certain housing, hold a job, or even volunteer. Some fear to show themselves in public or to share their last names or their former professions with people they may happen to meet. A few even worry about how they are going to pay the rent or buy food, given that making payments of any kind to those on the “credibly accused list” can be an unpopular practice within a diocesan chancery.
In addition to the obvious problems relating to the absence of proof and the lack of due process in such cases, there is also the fundamental violation of human rights when a person is punished with a retroactive application of the law (see Article 11 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights). The retroactive application of the church’s penal law is specifically prohibited in the Codes for both the Latin and Eastern Rite Churches (see c. 1313, §1 CIC; c. 1412 §2 CCEO). Yet citations to the law are often met with a yawn—or a contemptuous sniff—as if adherence to fundamental principles of justice is somehow incompatible with the genuine desire to protect children.
How would St. Augustine fare these days, one is left to wonder. His Confessions admit to such things as deliberate theft, persisting in false religion, and fathering a child out of wedlock, not to mention imposing untold suffering on his poor mother. Yet after Monica’s tears and prayers, and upon witnessing the faithful example of St. Ambrose, this apparent ne’er-do-well turned his life around, sought baptism, and became not only a bishop and a founder of a famous religious order, but a pillar of Western civilization—and a saint.