4. Exaggerated Individualism. Finally, there is a not-so-subtle critique of American culture that is widely held in the Holy See that regards the Catholic Church in the United States as infected with radical individualism. Americans tend to be, in a celebrated phrase of Cardinal Francis George of Chicago, “Catholic in faith, Protestant in culture." Americans are at heart congregationalists, according to this analysis, accustomed to thinking of parishes as quasi-autonomous local bodies with at best a quid pro quo relationship with the bishop, the diocese, and the broader universal Church. American Catholics have little sense of their organic incorporation into the Church understood as an image of the Body of Christ. They construe governance inside the Church on the model of the social contract, meaning that one structure is essentially as good as another as long as it passes the test of common consent. They construe relationships within the Church on the corporate model— managers and employees are useful so long as they achieve their objectives, but expendable if that changes. All this, many in the Holy See believe, is a distortion of a genuinely Roman Catholic ecclesiology and reflects the imprint of Calvinism and its individualistic theology. In analyzing the crisis, therefore, some in the Holy See would regard the ferocious public response and vocal demands for reform as indicators of a brash but essentially superficial American Catholic sensibility.
Once again, it is possible to find elements of truth to this critique. But what drops from view is that American anger about the sexual abuse crisis pivots on the point that the most vulnerable members of the Church community, its children, were violated and then placed at risk of further violation. In fact, the argument could be made that in privileging the welfare of individual priests above children and the broader Church, it is the bishops and, at least indirectly, the Holy See who most egregiously failed the community throughout the course of this crisis. It is true that Americans are shaped in a thousand ways by economic and political liberalism and its exaltation of individual freedom, which often means they do not have a sufficient appreciation for the importance of community. That is perhaps the fundamental challenge to Catholic catechesis in the United States. Yet it would be an analytical mistake to regard American Catholics as cavalier or rootless when it comes to the Church. If American Catholics felt no investment in the community, there would be no crisis.
SPEAKING THE SAME LANGUAGE
Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has described the difficulties these days of staging rational debate across cultural and political differences:
It is easy to understand why protest becomes a distinctive moral feature of the modern age and why indignation is a predominant modern emotion. . . . Protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because . . . protestors can never win an argument: the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because . . . the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. . . . Protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be e fective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally e fective.
MacIntyre believes protest is futile because the protestors and those against whom their protest is lodged do not share a common set of philosophical assumptions, and hence in a literal sense neither understands what the other is talking about. In this final section, the aim will be to bring the Holy See and the American Catholic street into conversation, rather than the sterile exercise of protest as MacIntyre has described it. The device we’ll use is to identify a set of values that both Rome and the American street strove to assert and defend during the sexual abuse crisis, albeit with different ideas of what those values mean in practice. The hope is to indicate places where thoughtful conversation might lead to deeper understanding.
Justice
As the scandals unfolded in 2002, American Catholics and the Vatican accused each other of injustice. Many Americans believed the Vatican was more interested in covering up for priests and bishops than in taking decisive action to ensure justice for victims. This reaction exemplified the larger problem of clericalism presumed to explain, at least in part, why bishops looked the other way rather than dealing more firmly with abuser priests. Hardball legal tactics and evasion with the press, critics charged, reflected a choice to bolster the institution at the expense of victims and the broader community. These charges were amplified in the press because the Church is supposed to set a moral standard, so its failures seem all the more spectacular.
On the other hand, Vatican officials accused the American Church and even the American bishops of caving in to a lynch-mob mentality, rushing to punish accused priests without adequate protection of their natural law rights to defend their good name. They also felt the American bishops were too feckless in defending the public reputation of the Church, an impression that also reached its zenith at the June meeting of the bishops’ conference in Dallas and its extraordinary “listening session" with victims of sexual abuse and other lay commentators. This too, some Vatican officials felt, was unjust, since it amounted to defamation of the Catholic Church. Finally, some Vatican officials believed that the real injustice at the heart of the American crisis was that too many American bishops had lacked the courage to combat moral and doctrinal laxity in the ranks of their clergy, and the American Church was reaping the bitter fruits of that failure. Failure to preach, teach, and enforce the truth is, from this point of view, the height of injustice.
In the end, a balanced analysis would probably find that both critiques are onto something. In their concern to support priests and to protect the institution, some bishops did fail to do justice to victims. The lengths to which some bishops went to keep struggling members of the clerical club afloat, so transparent in Cardinal Law’s letters to Paul Shanley, a Boston priest accused of multiple acts of sexual abuse, was a vice born of an excess of virtue. Bishops such as Law saw these priests as fellow members of the clerical fraternity and wanted to give them every last benefit of the doubt. They were also acting out of the theology inherent in the rite of ordination, in which a new priest pledges loyalty to the bishop, and the bishop in turn annoints the priest’s hands with oil, signifying his share in the sacrificial ministry of Christ. This creates a sacred bond of reciprocal obligation and support, and most clergy take it quite seriously.
In itself, that’s a noble enough instinct. The problem is that it tends to define those not in the clerical club as of lesser importance, which is the inherent weakness in every tribal morality. One Vatican official told me that many American priests certainly knew about the misdeeds of their brother priests, but were too hesitant in denouncing them. They will have to learn, he said, the practice of fraternal correction based on Matthew 18:15–17: “If your brother sins, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother. If he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, so that every fact may be established on the testimony of two or three witnesses. If he refuses to listen to them, tell the Church. If he refuses to listen even to the Church, then treat him as you would a Gentile or a tax collector." The bottom line is that the clerical club was too often fatally soft on wayward members.
At the same time, however, a class of zealots in the American press and in the Church arguably pushed the bishops toward a harshly punitive stance that was not consistent with the gospel. Certainly it seemed ironic that the American bishops had often criticized “three strikes and you’re out" policies in the criminal justice system, while implementing what amounted to a “one strike" policy for their own priests. In his typically tart, but not wholly inaccurate, fashion, Fr. Andrew Greeley wrote that some victims’ leaders “probably would not be satisfied if the Vatican had mandated castration for every priest in the nation."
Underlying this divergence between
Rome and the American street, however, is a common concern for justice. Both sides agree that the Church’s response to the scandals must be more than a pragmatic exercise in damage control. If necessary, even overwhelming public pressure and normal corporate logic must give way to doing the right thing. If bishops have to defy their lawyers and insurance companies to meet with victims, they should, and if the bishops have to defy Bill O’Reilly and the Boston Globe to uphold due process for accused priests, again, so be it. This common passion for justice could have created, and still could create, the basis for much constructive conversation about what the demands of justice are in the American situation. This conversation struggled for traction, however, because it was often obscured by suspicions from one party that the other was merely feigning concern for justice and was really acting on the basis of more craven motives.
Accountability
Perhaps no aspect of the sex abuse saga so angered American Catholics as the perception that the bishops, especially Law, were “getting away with it," that no one was holding them accountable. As long as Cardinal Law remained in office, the sense grew that the system was broken. This reaction was drawn from American corporate and political life, where poor performance or scandals are always followed by the resignation or firing of key personnel. Football coaches lose their jobs if their teams don’t win; corporate CEOs are sacked if their companies don’t perform. Americans often accuse the Vatican of being “the last absolute monarchy on earth," with accountability being to no one but the Pope. If he’s not cracking the whip, then his deputies can get away with murder, and many Americans felt that has largely described the response from the Holy See to the crisis in the United States.
From the Vatican’s point of view, as we saw in chapter 3, accountability has a very different ring. A bishop’s accountability is not to shareholders, fans, or electoral constituencies, but to God and to the Roman Catholic faith. A bishop is not judged on the basis of performance, but fidelity. This is not a job, but a sacramental bond between bishop and diocese that is more akin to a marriage. In the early centuries of the Church, it was considered almost heretical for a bishop to move from one diocese to another on exactly this basis. It wasn’t until Pope Marinus I in 882 that a bishop of Rome was named who had previously been the bishop of another diocese, and it caused a furor. Among other things, it was a violation of canon 15 of the Council of Nicea: “Bishops, priests, and deacons are not to pass from one church to another." (In 897, the deceased Pope Formosus was the subject of the infamous “Cadaver Synod." Eight months after his death, his successor, Pope Stephen IV, ordered Formosus exhumed and placed on trial for a variety of offenses, including the charge of having deserted his original diocese. Formosus was found guilty and his body was mutilated before being tossed into the Tiber River.)
Under sacramental logic, a diocese does not have a right to a superstar bishop, just as a family does not have the right to a perfect father. One’s continuance in office is not calculated on the basis of the bottom line. What counts is the faithful determination to soldier on when things get tough. For this reason, in the institutional culture of the Holy See, the bias is strongly in favor of a bishop remaining in place during times of crisis. To walk away would seem a failure in fidelity, and a kind of behavior that is itself unaccountable. It is not that a bishop is not accountable to his people, but rather precisely that his bond with his people is sacramental, not contractual, and he doesn’t have the right to walk away even if they’re angry or disappointed in him. It is precisely in such a moment when he must buckle down and repair the harm.
The Holy See also tends not to remove problem bishops because, politically, retirement is seen as a reward for a job well done. A retired bishop, and a fortiori a retired cardinal, has all of the privileges of rank with few of the burdens. The tendency is not to let a man retire until he has cleaned up any obvious mess. The case of Cardinal Michele Giordano of Naples offers an illustration. Italian prosecutors began investigating Giordano in January 1997 when his brother Mario Lucio was indicted for running a loan-sharking ring. Investigators found that most of the cash had come from the cardinal, an amount equivalent to roughly $800,000. The case went to trial, making Giordano, seventy-one, the highest-ranking Church official ever to stand in the dock. Judge Vincenzo Starita, who heard the case without a jury, eventually found Giordano innocent on December 22, 2000. Giordano’s alibi was that the money came out of personal funds he had saved over fifty years as a priest. Giordano acknowledged that he was guilty of poor record keeping. In essence, the defense boiled down to Giordano being guilty of naïveté, not fraud.
At every stage—when the investigation was first announced, when the charges were filed, when the trial began, and right up to the day the verdict was announced—rumors abounded that Giordano would be removed by the Vatican. One version had him heading off to a monastery, another that he would be brought to the Vatican City-State and given a job where the Italian civil authorities could not reach him. As was the case with Law, local newspapers were full of stories about how Giordano had lost the confidence of his people, how he could not govern, how embarrassed and angry the Vatican was, and how it was only a matter of time until the ax fell. Yet Giordano is still the cardinal of Naples as of this writing. Officials in the Secretariat of State said after the fact that they never had any intention of coming to Giordano’s aid. That was how the system held him accountable: he was forced to stay and fix his problems.
Americans complain that this model fails to account for a situation in which a bishop is simply unsuited to lead. Vatican officials reply that Americans are too quick to cry “off with their heads," and do not appreciate that a bishop is not a CEO but a spiritual father. Both points undoubtedly have merit, and both can be pushed too far. It’s true, for example, that the Vatican often struggles to appreciate even elementary notions of accountability that could be helpful from the point of view of good government. For example, one cardinal has been pushing the Holy See for years to hire an outside accounting firm to perform a certified annual audit of its accounts. To date, Vatican powers-that-be have not responded favorably, in part because they resist building Anglo-Saxon cynicism about abuse of power into the system. That leaves the Holy See vulnerable to corruption and incompetence. At the same time, it is also true that America is a disposable society where relationships are too often, and too easily, discarded. Americans are sometimes too quick to let themselves off the hook, as witnessed by the divorce rate. Americans sometimes lack a sense of accountability to their commitments and should welcome the Vatican’s insistence that bishops live up to theirs.
What is not helpful is for one party to assert that the other lacks respect for the very idea of accountability. Expressions such as, “Rome couldn’t care less what the people think," or “Americans think two thousand years of Church tradition don’t apply to them," are both unfair and counterproductive. Both parties seek a more accountable Church, and that provides a basis for common cause.
Compassion
Both Rome and the American street accused one another of failures of compassion at key moments during the crisis. Many in the Holy See have been shocked at the punitive character of American reaction to the crisis, the mania to drive out guilty priests. At its worst, this impulse can be evocative of other American purges of alleged sinners— witch burnings, for example, or the McCarthyite “red scare." Such a mentality seems far removed from the redemption and forgiveness described in the gospels and incarnated in the Roman Catholic sacrament of reconciliation. On the other hand, Americans accused the bishops and the Vatican of lacking compassion in their treatment of the victims of sexual abuse. This perceived insensitivity runs all the way to the top, since Pope John Paul II never responded to requests to meet with victims.
Both sides would perhaps reassure the other if there were more evidence of compassion in their own positions. American Catholics would assuage much Roman anxiety if they toned down attacks on bishops and on clerical culture, and
spoke more of recovery as a project of the entire community, clergy and laity together. This is one reason that movements such as Voice of the Faithful make Roman sensibilities nervous, since it can look like an interest group inside the Church, pitting the laity against the hierarchy. This is not to say Voice of the Faithful is unhelpful, but that the vocabulary and strategies used can sometimes raise apprehensions. Vatican officials, meanwhile, would strike a much more positive chord if they were to visibly meet with victims and offer in a personal way the compassion of the gospel to which they so often refer in statements. The bold appointment of Archbishop Sean O’Malley to Boston, whose record on outreach to victims is exemplary, shows that someone in the Holy See gets the point. It would be far more effective, however, if the Pope himself were to offer consolation in his own name and through his own presence.
Truth
American Catholics accuse the Vatican of dishonesty on sexuality. It preaches sexual chastity, but does not seem willing to address in a forthright way notorious violations of chastity among its own clergy. The Holy See, on the other hand, often suspects that Americans come from a culture of political compromise in which the very notion of objective truth is alien. Americans, they worry, have a pragmatist view of doctrine and discipline that reflects the imprint of American philosophers such as William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce—if it’s not working, get rid of it. When Americans press the Vatican to be more flexible, to be more willing to compromise on matters such as celibacy and the role of laity, officials in Rome often conclude that the hidden message is the age-old response of Pilate before Christ: “Truth? What is that?" Thus Vatican officials believe that across a whole range of issues, from celibacy to the authority of the hierarchy, the already-tenuous American commitment to Catholic tradition may crack under the strain of the crisis.
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