The second case is that of Archbishop Anthony Apuron of Agaña, in Guam. He too was accused of molesting boys and in June 2016 was relieved of his administrative duties and summoned to Rome. As complaints against Apuron multiplied, Archbishop Savio Hon Tai Fai, named temporary caretaker of the Church in Guam, announced that he had urged the Holy See to remove Apuron permanently from his post and appoint a successor. Taking a step in that direction in October, the Vatican named Michael Byrnes, an auxiliary bishop of Detroit, coadjutor archbishop of Agaña “with special faculties,” indicating that he would take over the administration of the Guam archdiocese immediately and succeed Apuron should the suspended archbishop be formally stripped of his office. Meanwhile a Vatican investigation of Apuron’s conduct was underway as of this writing.
In these two cases the Vatican demonstrated a stern resolve to discipline abusive bishops. Still the question remained: would the Holy See be equally firm in taking action against bishops who had not abused young people themselves but had been negligent in curbing abuse by priests under their jurisdiction?
Holding Bishops Accountable for Sex-Abuse Complaints
The pope’s own record is not impressive in this regard. In 2015 he promoted a Chilean prelate, Bishop Juan Barros, over loud protests that Barros had ignored complaints of abuse by a priest who was his friend. Angry Catholics demonstrated at the cathedral in Osorno, where Barros was to be installed, and a delegation of other Chilean bishops visited the Vatican to question the appointment. But Francis held firm, insisting that Barros was innocent of misconduct. He was caught on film saying that the Chilean Catholics were “stupid” to believe the complaints against Barros.
Later that year, the pontiff appointed his ally Cardinal Godfried Danneels to participate in the Synod of Bishops. There was no evident reason for the retired Belgian archbishop to be given such an active role. Indeed, there were compelling reasons for excluding him from a discussion of family life. Several years earlier Danneels had been the object of a Belgian police investigation into sexual abuse that culminated in a raid on archdiocesan offices and a search of the cardinal’s residence. No criminal charges were filed, but police had evidently suspected that the cardinal was concealing evidence of abuse. Indeed, Belgian newspapers published transcripts of a conversation, secretly recorded, in which the cardinal had urged a man to remain silent about the abuse he had suffered at the hands of another Belgian prelate. Confronted with that evidence, the cardinal’s office could only offer Danneel’s limp admission that “the whole approach…was not the right one.”
In 2014, Francis intervened in the case of Mauro Inzoli, an Italian priest who had been stripped of his clerical status by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) after he was found guilty of molesting adolescents. The pope, responding to pleas from a few of his close advisers, overruled that decision, though he was forced to reverse his own decision and laicize Inzoli after an Italian court found him guilty of multiple counts of sexual abuse.
So would Francis approve a policy that holds bishops accountable for their negligence? He seemed to answer that question in June 2015 with new disciplinary norms for bishops who fail to act on sexual abuse complaints. Recommended by a special papal commission headed by Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston, endorsed by the Council of Cardinals, and conditionally approved by the pope for five years, the norms would subject such bishops to the jurisdiction of a new tribunal under the CDF. Francis also approved the allocation of “adequate resources” to staff the new tribunal, which would also assist the CDF in cases involving sexual abuse by other clerics, for which it was already responsible.
Then a curious thing happened—nothing. No tribunal was established, no staff was assigned, no office space was set aside. No steps whatsoever were taken to carry out the policy that Francis had approved.
A year passed quietly, and then at last Francis issued a new policy. As he had done with the Secretariat for the Economy—endowing it with sweeping powers that he later trimmed back because of internal resistance—the pope rescinded his approval of the new norms. In a motu proprio of June 2016, the pope declared that there was no need for a new tribunal to handle disciplinary cases against negligent bishops because the Code of Canon Law already provides adequate remedies. All that was needed, therefore, was a clarification that the existing procedures for disciplining bishops “for grave causes” may be applied to bishops who fail to curtail abuse of minors by clerics. In announcing this new policy, the pope did not even mention the old one. But the tribunal announced in June 2015 was clearly a dead letter in June 2016.
The new policy raised two obvious questions. First, if canon law already allowed for disciplinary action against bishops, why had a new tribunal been erected? Second, if the disciplinary mechanism had been in place all along, why had no bishops been punished? As Father Alexander Lucie-Smith, writing in London’s Catholic Herald, concluded, “So it can be done. What is needed is the will to do it.”
If that conclusion was somewhat cynical, Cardinal O’Malley unintentionally vindicated such cynicism when he remarked that the motu proprio conveyed “a sense of urgency and clarity that was not there before.” Really? Had it taken fifteen years of catastrophe to arouse a “sense of urgency” sufficient for a clarification of canonical guidelines? If Cardinal O’Malley intended to be reassuring, he failed miserably.
A Commission without Support
In February 2017, the Associated Press reported on the work of O’Malley’s commission. The news was discouraging. In a paragraph inexplicably buried at the bottom of the article, the story revealed that the commission’s work was ignored:
Francis scrapped the commission’s proposed tribunal for bishops who botch abuse cases following legal objections from the congregation. The commission’s other major initiative—a guideline template to help dioceses develop policies to fight abuse and safeguard children—is gathering dust. The Vatican never sent the template to bishops’ conferences, as the commission had sought, or even linked it to its main abuse-resource website.
This shocking report followed close on the heels of complaints, aired by two members of the papal commission, that the group had been overworked and underfunded and that meetings were not held regularly. But the AP report was far more damaging, showing that the commission had launched two important projects, and neither had been implemented.
It was appalling that negligent bishops still were not being held accountable, though any recommendation for disciplining bishops was bound to face stiff opposition. But now it came to light that the papal commission had not even managed to post its own recommendations on its own website.
A few weeks later Marie Collins, a member of the commission who was herself a victim of abuse, resigned, complaining that the group’s work had been thwarted from within the Roman Curia. A few days after her public announcement, Cardinal Gerhard Müller, the prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—which was the main target of Collins’s criticism—defended the CDF and denied any foot-dragging on the abuse issue. Collins quickly shot back, rebutting the cardinal’s arguments.
Bear in mind that Collins’s resignation was not a bolt from the blue. She had frequently shown signs of impatience. Nor was she the first member of the commission to leave. Peter Saunders—who, like Collins, is an abuse victim—had been asked to resign in 2016 after issuing a series of angry comments. Refusing, he was placed involuntarily on an indefinite “leave of absence.” Another member, Claudio Papale, resigned in September 2016 without any public explanation.
In her resignation announcement, Collins cited the scuttling of the tribunal for negligent bishops and the failure to implement worldwide guidelines as sources of frustration. But the “last straw,” she said, had been the CDF’s refusal to implement a recommendation from the commission that every abuse victim who contacts the Vatican receive a personal reply from Rome. Cardinal Müller’s entirely reasonable response was that personal contact with abuse victims should be the r
esponsibility of local bishops, not officials in Rome. The CDF hears hundreds of abuse cases, originating in dioceses all around the world. It seems unrealistic to expect that the CDF become familiar with every person involved. An American who appeals his case to the Supreme Court expects a fair hearing but not a personal note from one of the justices.
In his response to other complaints, however, Müller was less compelling. He characterized the tribunal for bishops as a mere proposal rather than an established fact. Yet Vatican Radio had announced in June 2015, “Pope Francis has created a new Vatican tribunal section to hear cases of bishops who fail to protect children from sexually abusive priests,” and the Vatican press office had reported, “The Council of Cardinals agreed unanimously on these proposals and resolved that they be submitted to the Holy Father, Pope Francis, who approved the proposals and authorized the provision of sufficient resources for this purpose.”
But of course the tribunal had not been set up, and now, months later, Müller explained the odd sequence of events. After the pope had approved the tribunal, Vatican officials discussed the plan and concluded that the disciplinary task could be handled by the Congregation for Bishops (and the Congregation for the Eastern Churches for bishops of the Eastern rites, or the Congregation for Evangelization for those in mission territories). So Collins’s complaint was at least partially correct—the Roman Curia did block the implementation of the O’Malley commission’s plan.
Still Müller could justifiably argue that the fundamental goal of the papal commission—the establishment of a means to discipline negligent bishops—had been achieved. Evidently Francis was convinced that the approach recommended by the Roman Curia was superior to the approach he had approved a year earlier. It was odd, however, that the Curia had apparently discussed that approach only after the initial proposal had been approved. In another display of the chaotic administrative style that has characterized this pontificate, the O’Malley commission, the Council of Cardinals, and the pope had instituted an important new policy without having consulted the officials most closely involved.
In her answer to Müller, Marie Collins produced other evidence that the O’Malley commission was not working closely with other Vatican offices. She complained that CDF officials did not attend the commission’s meetings or respond to invitations for discussions. The picture that emerged was of a papal commission detached from the regular offices of the Vatican: a commission that could not persuade other Vatican officials to cooperate or even to post its recommendations on the Holy See’s website.
Marie Collins charged that the Roman Curia was not in sympathy with the papal commission, and in his response, Müller indirectly lent credence to that complaint by implying that the commission did not recognize the realities of the work at the Vatican. So was the commission being unreasonable, or was the CDF being intransigent? In an important sense it did not matter. One way or another, two important Vatican bodies were not cooperating. And the failure of anyone to make them cooperate by clear directives from above suggested that—rhetoric aside—ending the sex-abuse scandal still was not a top papal priority.
In September 2017, Francis finally met with the commission that he had established in 2014. He acknowledged that the Church had been “late” in responding to the problem of sexual abuse and that the commission had been forced to “swim against the tide.” The pope made the remarkable confession that he himself was “learning on the job”—learning, for example, to accept a “zero tolerance” policy fifteen years after the sexual abuse scandals had exploded. But while he encouraged the commission in its work and was pleased that some episcopal conferences had accepted the commission’s recommendations, the pope offered no new promises. Marie Collins responded to the pope’s remarks by saying, “Zero tolerance is the way to go, but it’s toothless if there isn’t a sanction for anyone who doesn’t operate it.”
Playing Favorites
Disturbing as it is that the campaign for reform has bogged down, it is still more disturbing that Francis has shown a pronounced tendency to exempt his own allies from such reforms as he has proposed, thereby rendering those reforms ineffectual. The Vatican has a long and unhappy history of allowing prelates to escape the consequences of their own missteps; any successful Vatican reform must begin with a determination to hold Church officials accountable. The high cost of playing favorites was illustrated by two damaging incidents that became public in the summer of 2017, just before this book went to press.
First, the Vatican indicted two former officials of the Bambino Gesù Hospital (which is owned and operated by the Holy See) on embezzlement charges. This indictment was the first such action brought by Vatican prosecutors under the new rules designed to promote transparency and accountability in financial transactions. The Vatican had been under pressure from European banking authorities to prosecute violations of these rules.
Giuseppe Profiti and Massimo Spina—the president and treasurer, respectively, of the Bambino Gesù Foundation—were charged with improperly spending more than four hundred thousand euros in foundation funds on the renovation of an apartment owned by Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. Investigators unearthed a series of financial transactions that suggested a contractor was paid by two different Vatican offices for his work in a case that has given rise to the Vatican’s first indictments for financial misconduct. The contractor, Gianantonio Bandera—who was recommended for the job by Cardinal Bertone—eventually filed for bankruptcy and did not complete the renovations. Neither Bandera nor Cardinal Bertone was named as a defendant in the case.
The indictment came just a week after an Associated Press report uncovered evidence of serious mismanagement at the Bambino Gesù Hospital in the past: mismanagement that had compromised the quality of patients’ care. Vatican officials said that the report had been exaggerated and that the existing problems had been addressed by new hospital administrators.
In the second scandal, Vatican police broke up a drug-fueled homosexual orgy in the apartment of the private secretary to Cardinal Francesco Coccopalmerio, the president of the Pontifical Council for Legislative Texts. It is not clear how the secretary, Msgr. Luigi Capozzi, had landed an apartment in a residence reserved for the highest-ranking Vatican officials. Apparently he had influential friends, and there were reports that he was in line for appointment as a bishop.
Capozzi had access to a car with Vatican license plates, another sign of influential friends, which made him virtually exempt from searches by the Italian police and could have facilitated the transportation of illegal drugs. The location of his residence—in a building with one door leading onto Vatican territory, the other onto the streets of Rome—was also ideal for someone avoiding police oversight. He finally pushed too far, however. Other residents of the building (presumably including some of those top Vatican officials) complained about a steady train of young male visitors and of noisy parties at Capozzi’s apartment. Those complaints prompted the police raid.
These two cases—one financial scandal, one sexual scandal—drew attention to the unfinished business of Vatican reform. Could Catholics be confident that the financial affairs of the Bambino Gesù Hospital were now in order? Or that no more powerful Vatican figures were being protected from prosecution? Did the unsavory career of Msgr. Capozzi signal the enduring power of a “gay lobby” within the Vatican? Effective Vatican reforms might have provided satisfactory answers to these questions.
CHAPTER FOUR
Manipulating the Synod
Worries about Pope Francis’s provocative statements and his commitment to upholding Church doctrine came to a head with an extraordinary assembly of the Synod of Bishops in 2014 and the ordinary assembly of the Synod in 2015. Until then he had issued few authoritative documents, but the papal document that would follow the two assemblies would be a statement that could not be dismissed: a formal expression of the Church’s Magisterium.
The Synod is an advisory body of bishops from around the world—some selected by the p
ontiff, others chosen by their peers in the various national episcopal conferences—established (or revived) by Pope Paul VI after the Second Vatican Council. It meets in “ordinary” assemblies every three or four years to consider an important matter in the life of the Church, issuing a final statement after a few weeks of deliberation. Though not authoritative in itself, that statement becomes the basis for a “post-synodal apostolic exhortation” by the pope, a teaching document that carries a high level of teaching authority.
The assembly of the Synod follows months of preparation. A topic is chosen and the Vatican’s permanent office of the Synod prepares a series of questions to be discussed. These questions are circulated among the world’s bishops for comment, and their suggestions are incorporated into a second working document, which serves as the basis for the Synod discussions.
An ordinary meeting of the Synod was scheduled for October 2015, the topic being marriage and family life. Francis decided to call an “extraordinary” session to meet in October 2014, giving this crucial topic a double dose of discussion. That decision seemed eminently reasonable, in light of the extraordinary assault on family life in the early twenty-first century: the high rate of family breakdown and divorce, the rising incidence of cohabitation and promiscuity, the routine acceptance of abortion and contraception, the drive for legal recognition of same-sex unions.
As the preparations began, however, it became clear that Francis had a different priority for this Synod. He had called a consistory—a meeting of the College of Cardinals—for February 2014, at which he would appoint new members to the college. As is now customary, the cardinals assembled in Rome the day before the consistory for a general discussion. Francis had asked a German prelate, Cardinal Walter Kasper, the retired president of the Pontifical Council for Christian Unity, to address them.
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