Three Odd Documents

Last week, I could not cope with Pope Francis’s letter to the United States bishops as they began a weeklong retreat in Chicago. Why did he think they should pray together because of a “crisis of credibility”? To repent of the sin of disunity, as I read it. This is vastly different from repenting for the sins of sexual abuse or its cover-up. This document is very different from the angry letter he wrote to the Chilean bishops last spring and the retreat from the meeting that caused all of them to offer their resignations.

We learned on Friday in the NCR that the leader of the retreat, the Preacher of the Papal Household, delivered eleven talks during the Jan. 2-8 meeting. I wonder how the rest of the meeting was facilitated? Small groups? Homilies? Scolding? Calling out? What would build solidarity?  The Pope would like them to be responsible to each other for the good of the church, solidarity like that, united in mission. As a process person I value greatly the emotional connection that comes from intense communal experiences away from the rest of the world, but it’s hard to imagine this group of men comfortable with that. Wednesday the retreat ended. Will the bishops emerge as a band of brothers “weaving” a divided church back together, to quote the best image in the letter, and one that might be seen as womanly?

This week I read the January 11 print edition of the National Catholic Reporter, which contains a commentary by Jamie Manson about the second odd document, a book I have not read. It’s a long interview of Pope Francis with Claretian Father Fernando Prado. It generated a lot of comment in early December because in it the Pope shared his concerns about LGBTQ people in the priesthood and religious life.  Manson does an excellent job reviewing the psychology that makes a distinction between “deep-seated homosexual tendencies,” which concern the Pope, and “transitory” ones, which seem to be equated with youthful sexual experimentation. A 2005 instruction on admitting gay men to seminaries suggests that the latter “must be clearly overcome at least three years before ordination to the diaconate.” So this thinking may have been the “cover” as sexual behavior was accepted in seminaries.

Manson searches out the sources of such teaching and finds it in the Catholic Medical Society, which I had not even heard of until an article three Philadelphia members published December 18 in the Inquirer, “Sex determined at conception.” It’s not my field, but even I know enough to know that theory is flawed. Manson characterizes a paper in the society’s journal about the “homosexual tendencies” as “junk science.” She goes on to say:

To Francis’ credit, he does not associate homosexuality with clerical sex abuse … [but] says that gays who are already ordained and lesbians and gays who are in consecrated life must “be exquisitely responsible, trying not to scandalize their communities or the holy and faithful People of God by living a double life.”
 
Francis’ words paint a portrait of gays and lesbians as those who will always struggle to remain celibate and who always run a high risk of causing a scandal. That he holds them to a special standard of sinless perfection suggests that he not only sees homosexuality as deviant, he also sees gays and lesbians as somehow powerless against their sexual desires and highly vulnerable to acting out sexually. …
 
Many Vatican insiders predict that at next year’s Synod of Bishops, Francis may attempt to relax the celibacy requirement. … Is he afraid that, when that day comes, gay priests will feel as entitled to sexual love as straight priests?

Oh, there is so much more that could be said! Manson’s article appealed to me because she finds and deplores the research that bolsters positions that hold the church back from an inclusivity that respects all persons.

Maybe her well-researched article appealed to me today because I had just read a long analysis by Peter Steinfels in Commonweal of the third odd document, the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report on sexual abuse. What Steinfels sets out to do is to determine the truth of the report’s “ringing charges about the handling of abuse.” He calls for a non-binary approach that recognizes differences over time and place, and then proceeds to do that analysis in detail for the diocese of Erie and briefly for four other dioceses.

Steinfels clearly identifies his sources about Erie, which include not only the report but the response of former Bishop Trautman and a study by K&L Gates, a law firm commissioned by current Bishop Persico. One by one, he looks at the cases and establishes what the response was in each. He avoids the graphic descriptions of the Grand Jury report, which makes it hardly enthralling reading, but it’s very convincing. He concludes:

But even allowing for misjudgments and uncertainties, what the Erie profiles show overall not only rebuts the report’s charges but, in fact, stands in sharp contrast to the standard narrative of the sex-abuse scandal, i.e., that bishops responded to accusations of abuse by knowingly shuffling dangerous priests from parish to parish.
 
Pause, necessary pause. To say that is not to deny or diminish the inexcusable suffering inflicted on victims, at the time or in the long years that followed. It is not to say that such shuffling never occurred under earlier bishops. It is only to say that the grand jury’s own evidence does not substantiate the prevailing script about how predators got away with committing and recommitting their crimes. Instead, the report’s evidence shows that—to repeat—for over three decades and in the vast bulk of cases, Erie’s bishops did not respond to accusations of abuse by knowingly shuffling dangerous priests from parish to parish.   

I am including this quote because I think it defends the article against the kind of attitude with which I approached it: Oh, a cover-up. An apology for the indefensible. It rises above that. It is a critique of the report and of the grand jury system. Steinfels feels the report was “designed” to serve a political purpose, “to be a weapon in the debate” about “legislation suspending the statute of limitations for civil suits and discrediting church opposition.”

And Steinfels’ article itself may serve a church political purpose. Thinking about the February meeting in Rome, how could conclusions like these fail to empower the American delegates?

the conclusion that a careful, unbiased reading of the Pennsylvania report compels is this: the Dallas Charter has worked. Not worked perfectly, not without need for regular improvements and constant watchfulness. But worked. …It set out, and has regularly fine-tuned, procedures, practices, and standards that can be overseen by middling caretaker leaders as well as outstanding, proactive ones. [I like this description of the Bishops!]
 
The Dallas Charter is decidedly not a recipe that can simply be transferred to any society or culture or legal and governmental situation around the globe. But American bishops should go to the Vatican’s February summit meeting on sexual abuse confident that the measures they’ve already adopted have made an important difference.

Will this analysis make the American bishops happy as they return from their retreat? Will they wonder what all their penance was about, if indeed that was what happened in Chicago? Will it shatter whatever tentative unity was achieved in that week by confirming the “we did enough” side in the debate about the sex abuse crisis? Or will it allow all the American bishops to move forward with confidence, to know that they can handle this crisis without creating a response that does more to lock in a clerical solution than to heal and nourish the entire church in its mission?