Should Some Bishops Take a Bullet for the Church, USA Today, March 31, 2010

Should Some Bishops 'Take a Bullet for the Church'?

USA Today
March 31, 2010

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/Religion/post/2010/03/vatican-sex-abuse-bishops-pope-benedict/1

UNITED STATES -- Isn't nuance annoying? It's so pesky to say on the one hand/on the other, or he did X but he also did Y, or the context of such-and-such is so-and-so, which might alter your perceptions. All that information has a way of messing up neat answers. And so it is with examining Pope Benedict XVI and the global sexual abuse crisis.

He faces unrelenting criticism for failing to rid the priest ranks of predators for decades, for choosing treatment, silence and respect for accused priests' reputations, and the Church's, over the safety and well-being of children and teens, and for failing to hold bishops' feet to the fire on the jobs they are appointed to do -- to preach, teach and govern the Catholic Church.

Reckless remarks are flying (see Sally Quinn equating the Pope to Nixon enmeshed in Watergate). Anger mounts as demonstrations are planned by victims (today in California, aimed at Cardinal Roger Mahony). And the Los Angeles Times has profiled Jeffrey Anderson, the victims' advocate who has been trying for more than a decade to establish in U.S. courts that blame for the ongoing abuse epidemic goes all the way to the Vatican.

Not so fast.

The Associated Press writes today:

Plaintiffs in the Kentucky suit contend that bishops are employees of the Vatican. That point is crucial to determining whether the Holy See can be held responsible for their behavior.

There's a general consensus among legal scholars that an employee is someone who works for the employer, who controls the details of the work. Attorneys for the Vatican are expected to argue that diocesan bishops do not work for the pope, and that the Holy See does not exercise the day-to-day control over their work necessary to create an employment relationship.

Are you following this? Bishops are directly appointed by the pope (overwhelmingly, U.S. bishops at the time of the scandal's peak here were appointees of Pope John Paul II) but he's no longer responsible for what they do once they're on the job.

That's not exactly a model that makes sense to Americans, unless you think of bishops like Supreme Court appointees who often don't turn out to be as liberal or conservative as the president who named them expected them to be.

But unlike the Supreme Court, bishops are not lifetime appointees. So it is possible under canon law that the pope could fire them or frog march them toward an immediate resignation, rather than waiting for individual nation-by-nation bishops conferences to put the squeeze on bishops who failed their flocks.

Meanwhile, in the USA, where 62% of the bishops who were in place in 2002 have already retired or resigned at the age 75 limit for service, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement Tuesday on the crisis. It details their simultaneous efforts to get a grip on the crisis now, to show respect, however belated, for victims' pain, and still defend the pope as acting honorably, swiftly and strongly to rid the Church of abusers.

In Germany, bishops have set up an abuse hotline for victims, similar to hotlines established in U.S. parishes eight years ago.

Photo by Ben Stansall

National Catholic Reporter Vatican expert John Allen, in an interview with National Public Radio, set the context for how the Vatican is responding to the rising anger worldwide, a response tempered by centuries of history facing down secular enemies. The Vatican's theological model for a bishop, Allen says,

... is not that he is the CEO of a corporation, but he's the father of a family. And as we would say with regular human families ... when things get tough, you don't tell the father to walk away. You tell him to ... try to solve the problem. That's their understanding of what accountability means.

... But at the end of the day, I would say that in the court of popular opinion, this business of how do you hold bishops accountable for their failures, that would be the single most important bit of unfinished business from this crisis.

Rev. Thomas Reese, a political scientist and Jesuit priest, writes that while Benedict might need to tells some bishops to "take a bullet for the church," it would be "a step backward if he stepped down, because this pope understands the crisis better than most of his potential replacements.

As a Vatican official, he supported the American bishops when in 2002 they adopted a zero- tolerance rule so that no abusive priest could be returned to ministry. He also condemned the abuse and expressed sorrow when he visited the United States in 2008, the high point of which was his meeting with victims of abuse.

The question is should he be judged by what he thought and did in the past or by what he thinks and does today. Clearly he can continue to grow and do more to deal with the sexual abuse crisis. For example, he should make zero tolerance the law for the whole church and tell bishops around the world to strictly enforce it. He can also continue to apologize and meet with more victims as he has promised.

There we go again with the nuance. This is no easy topic. Neither is it spiritually nourishing during Holy Week for believers to be confronted with constant scandal news when they seek to turn their eyes and hearts toward the best of what they believe their Church offers -- the message of Christ's resurrection.

Is scandal news, even nuanced analysis, interrupting the joy of Holy Week for you? Where's the spiritual lesson in all this?