Conservative Advocate: Bishops offer one-strike policy
America’s Roman Catholic bishops, meeting in Dallas last week, where confronted with a stark and difficult choice. It was easy enough to announce a firm policy regarding future sexual offenses by priests against children: One strike and you’re out. Turn them over to the civil authorities, and bar them from all ordinary priestly activities for the rest of their lives. At least they can’t complain that they didn’t have fair warning.
But what about priests whose offenses are in the past — often the distant past? One furtive grope 30 years ago simply cannot be compared to repeated episodes of sexual abuse stretching over a period of years. And true repentance does matter, especially if followed by decades of blameless conduct. One-size-fits-all is simply not a satisfactory rule for penalizing all the sorts of misconduct at issue here.
And yet public opinion, including most especially Catholic opinion, was inexorable: There must be “zero tolerance” for all such behavior, both past and future. And so the bishops, despite lifetimes spent assessing wrongdoing, insisting upon repentance, and extending forgiveness, gave way. Zero tolerance it would be.
Even on that basis, though, one suspects that individual bishops will find ways to distinguish among the punishments meted out. Past offenders with truly egregious records will be defrocked. Others, guilty of only one recorded offense many years ago, may be allowed to remain technically in the priesthood, though not permitted to wear clerical garb or celebrate Mass in public — spending the rest of their lives, as far as possible, invisibly.
In those circumstances, it is probably the best arrangement that can be made. But the crisis in the Catholic Church is not over. At least two major problems remain.
One involves those bishops who, in the past, knowingly allowed priests who had molested children to be moved to another parish or diocese, often to continue such conduct. In many cases the parishioners who reported the original misbehavior were bought off with financial settlements, in return for pledges to remain silent. Such bishops no doubt meant well, and again every case was different, but some of the bishops in effect acted as little short of enablers. What should be done with them?
In Dallas, the bishops collectively were silent on this point — quite possibly because they did not feel entitled to deal with it. Every bishop, after all, is personally appointed by the Pope, and is directly answerable to him. If a bishop is to be removed, it is the Pope who will have to remove him. One suspects that a good many bishops will feel obliged, and if necessary will be firmly urged, to offer their resignations to the Holy Father, for his decision. In all likelihood, some of these will be accepted.
Finally, the church will probably have to decide on a policy with regard to homosexual priests. It seems clear that in the past 30 or so years, in response to forces in the society at large and perhaps the latitudinarian impulses radiating from Vatican II, certain Catholic seminaries have welcomed homosexuals who wished to become priests. Under Catholic doctrine, there may have been nothing wrong with this, so long as the men in question were prepared to observe the priestly vow of celibacy. But some clearly were not (perhaps expecting that it would soon no longer be required in any case), and they have become what some have described as a sizeable “gay sub-culture” in the priesthood. This, in turn, may have contributed to the many reports of priests molesting teen-age boys. The church must decide the extent to which this is true, and what to do about it.
But Dallas was, on balance, an important first step on the path to restoring the health of the church.
(William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.)