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Catholic Culture - Trinity Communications [San Diego CA]
February 26, 2025
By Phil Lawler
In the past week, two important reports have called attention to the lingering, devastating fallout from the sex-abuse scandal. The fundamental problem today is the same problem that gave rise to the scandal in the first place: too many bishops are not acting like bishops.
First let me call your attention to an essay in First Things by Michael Mazza, with the provocative title: “Who’s Really Calling the Shots at US Diocesan Chanceries?” Mazza observes that Vatican II clearly taught that bishops are responsible for the operations of their own dioceses. In practice, however, “It seems that lawyers and risk managers, not bishops, are often running the show.”
Mazza can cite chapter and verse. Since 2002, when the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, caved in to demands from the state’s attorney general in order to avoid criminal prosecution, one diocese after another has agreed to prosecutors’ demands that endanger—in some cases openly violate—the Church’s own canon laws. Dioceses have agreed to make all personnel “mandated reporters” of abuse, even priests hearing sacramental confessions. They have agreed to publish lists of priests who have been “credibly accused” of abuse, even before those accused priests have any opportunity to defend themselves against the accusations.
Mazza could have gone further, listing the “pro-active” steps that dioceses have taken to satisfy the demands of civil authorities. They have set up intrusive programs, forcing ordinary parishioners to go through background checks before acting as ushers or singing in choirs. They have given law-enforcement officials access to internal diocesan communications. They have brought in secular “experts” to judge the adequacy of religious-education programs. But the First Things article concentrates primarily on the demands that have been placed on diocesan priests, and shows how a steady plunge in clerical morale can be attributed to the perception among priests that their bishops are more anxious to satisfy their lawyers than their pastors. Mazza concludes that “when such attorneys play hardball with the diocese’s own priests, one wonders who is really calling the shots at the chancery and whether the good of souls is really being fostered.”
While weighing that question, consider yesterday’s report by The Pillar on a new Vatican document instructing bishops that they should not publish lists of “credibly accused” priests. Actually the document in question is not particularly new; it was issued last September (so the US bishops should have been well aware of it), but only posted online last week.
This “new” document from the Dicastery for Legislative Texts, the Vatican body that provides definitive interpretation of the Code of Canon Law, explains what seems obvious in the first place: that a public listing of priests who have been accused of an offense—but never fully investigated, let alone allowed to defend themselves at trial—violates the rights of the accused.
To appreciate the ruling fully, one must understand what it means to say that a cleric has been “credibly accused.” Vatican protocols require bishops to make a preliminary investigation, and dismiss charges that can be quickly disproven. If there is no good reason to reject the charge immediately—even if there is no way to verify the accusation—the priest is deemed “credibly accused” and a thorough investigation is required. As the Dicastery for Legislative Texts observes, that first step requires only “a relatively low standard of proof.” By listing the priests who are “credibly accused,” the diocese encourages the false belief that they should be considered guilty until proven innocent.
That attitude is particularly unjust, the Vatican document remarks, if the accused priests are deceased, cannot defend themselves, and could no longer pose a threat even if they were proven guilty.
So the publication of lists of priests who have been “credibly accused” is an injustice, a breach of canon law, an offense against the healthy Anglo-American legal assumption that someone is innocent until proven guilty, and a violation of Vatican guidelines. Yet many American dioceses have published such lists. So who’s really in charge?