Object of jokes and derision, U.S. bishops battle to find footing: hierarchy on defense as critics doubt progress on Dallas promises - Analysis - Cover Story
Think of it as the Rodney Dangerfield episcopacy: The U.S. Catholic bishops can’t get any respect.
Meeting at yet another tumultuous moment, and mostly behind closed doors June 19-21, the church’s leaders insisted they are carrying out the promises made a year ago to remove sexual offenders from the priesthood, to investigate the causes of the crisis, and to implement programs to prevent additional abuse.
To their obvious frustration, the bishops receive little praise for their efforts. Instead, they are challenged by the press, doubted by lay activists and ridiculed by abuse victims.
Just prior to the meeting, the already embattled bishop of Phoenix, Thomas O’Brien, would be charged with leaving the scene of a fatal accident. A pedestrian, 43-year-old Jim Reed, died. O’Brien reportedly told police that he thought he had hit a dog or a cat. The O’Brien incident, said Chicago Cardinal Francis George, made for a “pretty sober gathering.”
That sobriety was not, however, shared by the popular culture. The bishops have become late night comic fodder.
Jay Leno: “Did you hear that Phoenix police arrested a bishop for hit and run driving? A bishop! Talk about making a collar.”
Meanwhile, the man appointed by bishops’ conference President Wilton Gregory to head an investigation into the crisis–former federal prosecutor and Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating–would compare recalcitrant bishops to members of La Cosa Nostra and then, no apology proffered, resign.
Jumping to the bishops’ defense was one of the nation’s leading criminal defense attorneys–counsel to indicted congressmen, cabinet members and an impeached president.
“The National Review Board does not believe there is a criminal organization afoot,” declared attorney Robert Bennett, a member of the panel established by the bishops to investigate the clergy sexual abuse crisis. Keating’s mafia metaphor, said Bennett, was “inappropriate” and “beyond the pale.”
Bennett’s comments followed a closed session at which review board members and the bishops discussed the board’s work, including a controversial diocese-by-diocese survey that California bishops said would violate that state’s stringent privacy laws; in addition, other bishops feared the data would become a weapon in the arsenal of emboldened prosecutors and aggressive litigators. The reluctance of California’s bishops–most notably Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony–to respond to the survey was the proximate cause of Keating’s outburst.
The survey’s response procedures were altered to ensure anonymity of the data, a move that satisfied the California concerns.
The St. Louis meeting differed from the most recent bishops’ gatherings–Dallas in June 2002 and Washington the subsequent November. In Dallas, they approved a Charter for the Protection of Children and Youth, while in Washington they refined the “norms” accompanying the charter to satisfy Vatican concerns.
The St. Louis meeting was to be relatively quiet–the public agenda dominated by seemingly mundane matters such as development of a National Directory for Catechesis and discussion of the “formation, ministry and life of permanent deacons.” The crisis would be confined to closed-door sessions at which the bishops would hear from the review board and consider a proposal to conduct the first nationwide “plenary council” in more than a century.
The O’Brien and Keating debacles necessitated a more aggressive approach, both from the floor of the meeting hall and in the press briefings and media gaggles that followed both the closed and open sessions.
“As far as I know,” Cardinal George insisted, “every bishop went back [after the Dallas meeting] and went through the records, and removed from ministry anyone who was credibly accused of this. I don’t know any other group that has done that. I don’t know whether journalists have done that. I don’t know whether politicians have done that. I don’t know whether sports directors have done that.”
It is “outrageous” and “totally unjust,” said George, to suggest that the “bishops have done nothing.”
From the floor of the assembly, St. Paul Archbishop Harry Flynn, chairman of the bishops’ ad hoc committee on sexual abuse, echoed the theme: “A monumental effort has been made to fulfill the promises of that charter, to implement measures that would remove offending clergy, to reach out to those so terribly injured by sexual abuse, and to restore the trust and confidence of our people and our priests.”
The bishops received a pep talk from Archbishop Gabriel Montalvo, apostolic nuncio to the United States. “We all know that we are going through difficult times and that some real problems within the church have been magnified to discredit the moral authority of the church,” said Montalvo. The bishops should not “retreat into isolation” because of the crisis, Montalvo said.