BREAKING: Albany Bishop Scharfenberger Calls for Lay-led Commissions

I know I went on a little bit of a rant today about this, so it’s very heartening to see the statement just released out of the Diocese of Albany by Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger. Here is the whole statement:

August 6, 2018
Statement by Bishop Edward B. Scharfenberger of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany:

While I am heartened by my brother bishops proposing ways for our Church to take action in light of recent revelations – and I agree that a national panel should be commissioned, duly approved by the Holy See – I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer. To have credibility, a panel would have to be separated from any source of power whose trustworthiness might potentially be compromised.

It is time for us, I believe, to call forth the talents and charisms of our lay faithful, by virtue of their baptismal priesthood. Our lay people are not only willing to take on this much-needed role, but they are eager to help us make lasting reforms that will restore a level of trust that has been shattered yet again. In speaking with them, we all hear their passion for our universal Church, their devotion to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and their hunger for the truth. They are essential to the solution we seek.

What is needed now is an independent commission led by well-respected, faithful lay leaders who are beyond reproach, people whose role on such a panel will not serve to benefit them financially, politically, or personally. These will be people with a deep understanding of the Catholic faith, but without an axe to grind or an agenda to push. It will not be easy, but it will be worth every ounce of effort, energy, and candor we can muster.

We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened. We must get this right. I am confident we can find a way to look outside ourselves, to put this in the hands of the Holy Spirit, and to entrust our very capable lay people, who have stood with us through very difficult times, to help us do the right thing. We need an investigation — the scope of which is not yet defined but must be defined — and it must be timely, transparent and credible.

Contact:
Mary DeTurris Poust
518.453.6618

With all due respect, Cardinal Wuerl, No. Bishops Investigating Bishops Won’t Do

This morning comes breaking news out of NCR, that Washington DC’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl has proposed a “national panel” to investigate any serious allegation made against Bishops.

And the panel would be comprised of, wait for it…bishops.

“Would we have some sort of a panel, a board, of bishops … where we would take it upon ourselves, or a number of bishops would be deputed, to ask about those rumors?” he suggested.

“It seems to me that’s one possibility, that there would be some way for the bishops, and that would mean working through our conference … to be able to address the question of sustained rumors,” said the Washington cardinal.

To that I would respond, “Well, your Eminence, yes and no.” Yes, there should be a panel– there should be panels in every diocese and every deanery, ready to look into serious allegations made against any representative of the Church. But with all due respect, sir, no, there ought not be a bishop residing on a single one of them.

There is an old Roman saying, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards?) In a sense that needs to be asked, now. The suggestion that the laity and the priests who trusted the bishops to do the right thing before — and have been amply burned for it — should just trust the bishops to do the right thing again would be farcical if it were not so insulting.

Wuerl’s remarks suggest that he really has no idea how catastrophic the revelations about Theodore McCarrick’s long-standing abuses (about which too many Cardinals and Bishops profess themselves “Shocked, shocked” as they slouch toward Eternity via Casablanca) have been to the trust of the laity. Let me spell it out: That trust has been shattered. It no longer exists.

The McCarrick story, joined to other tales now emerging about mistreatment of seminarians and lay folk, have effectively worn us out. We look at stories coming out of the United States, out of Chile, Honduras, and Australia, and we are finally — as perhaps never before — understanding the worldwide nature of the corruption that has taken hold within the depths of the Church, and we’re saying no more.

Your Eminence, Esteemed Bishops, please listen: Don’t give us another paper; don’t give us another bloodless statement about policies and procedures that somehow manages never to admit to failing, never offers a mea culpa, never uses the words “sin” or “Gospel” or brings forth the name of Christ Jesus.

Forgive me, but it feels very much like our bishops and “princes” have lost the plot. Too many of them, if they comment at all — and it’s astonishing to consider all of the bishops who have said nothing these many weeks — sound like they’re addressing a board of corporate directors rather than the Church founded by Jesus Christ, the One to whom they are publicly vowed and in whom they are presumed to live and move and have their being.

It is apparent to those of us in the lowly pews that our leadership could use a sustained retreat — a “time out” from temporal concerns — in order to refocus and recenter their lives around Christ and the Gospels, before all else; certainly before offices, before influence, before ambition or self-protection.

There needs to be self-examination and prayer and genuine penance undertaken by our bishops. All of them, the really great ones as well as the seemingly lost ones, because we all have a share in the reparations that must be made to God Almighty for the sake of his Church. And if any find they cannot make a full confession to their failings and re-commit themselves to the very Incarnate Word by whom they will be judged (just like the rest of us), then it would be better they resign, before they do more damage to souls and have to account for it.

If I sound cruel, that’s not my wish; I am genuinely concerned for the souls of these men, who need to finally hear us and understand the pain that has been caused because of what has been done, and what the leadership has failed to do.

From Mary DeTurris Poust, writing in Catholic New York:

…we wonder how much more—how much more can we take, how much more is still to come, how much more before we finally can’t bring ourselves back to church out of sheer exhaustion and disgust and, sadly, the gnawing realization that disbelief is creeping into our souls, because if one of our most powerful and respected leaders in the hierarchy could be so corrupt and the people surrounding him so willing to turn a blind eye to his immoral and destructive deeds, is all of this just a mirage?

Quite frankly, Catholics want leaders to talk about this, to acknowledge the horror and pain, and to ensure that what is happening now never happens again, because with each new revelation, the Body of Christ takes another blow and a few more parts drift away.

From Simcha Fisher:

You can’t do this to us anymore. I want to hear the bishops acknowledging that we are their children, and they betrayed us. Priests are their children, and they betrayed them. Seminarians are their children, and they betrayed them. …so many of our bishops have betrayed us, and so many of them still won’t listen. They’re still trying to save face, still planning to keep the farce going.

I want to see bishops — many bishops — writing a pastoral letter that says, “Yes, I knew what McCarrick was doing. Yes, I knew what the seminaries were like. Yes, I got letters from whistleblowers. I didn’t do anything. I helped keep it quiet. I persuaded myself it was in the Church’s best interest to pretend these horrors weren’t happening, even though it was my job to protect and defend my flock. Please pray for me, because I betrayed Christ, I betrayed my office, and I betrayed you all, and so I resign.”

There is no document that will be just as good.

Cardinal Wuerl is correct that there should be investigatory panels, but — as I have been writing for a few weeks — they must be entrusted to clear-eyed layfolk of varying gifts (from canon lawyers to stay-at-home parents) who bring with them no agenda beyond seeking out what is true. People who will bring in civil authorities when warranted and will not be afraid to make strenuous and public recommendations as to what actions should be taken. We might want to throw a few good priests and religious, and even a seminarian into the mix, too.

Look, I have no particular animus toward bishops, many of whom I admire and regard highly, but on the issue of accountability and sexual abuse issues they have proven themselves unequal to the task of thorough self-examination, investigation and follow-through. That responsibility must now be handed off.

There is a great deal to be considered and discussed and prayed over.

  • We are going to have to support our faithful and hard-working priests, who are once again being looked at with suspicion because their bishops have failed them.
  • We’re going to have to get the laity involved in every aspect of the administering of the church from the soup kitchens to the seminaries, where layfolk should participate in the screening and formation of our priests.
  • We’re going to have to stop insisting that the revelations that are going to come upon us like a deluge are strictly about sexual morality, or strictly about an abuse of power, as though the two are mutually exclusive. They are not.
  • We’re going to have to talk, calmly and thoughtfully, about whether closeting gay priests helped to contribute to the culture of clerical corruption.

That’s just a few things off the top of my head. There will be much more.

Dear bishops, please pay attention. I am hearing from people who are refraining from receiving Communion because they are so angry they feel unfit to partake. “I don’t want to be looking at the priest and wondering, ‘are you living a double life, too’ but the thought comes unbidden” a woman said to me this weekend. Multiple people have said they are so shaken it has affected their sleep.

If your people cannot sleep due to a sense of betrayal, disgust and anxiety over what is happening within their church, how in Christ’s name, can you?

UPDATE: Encouragement from the Diocese of Albany

Image: Public Domain

Fulton Sheen, Laity and Catholic Leadership: If Called to Correct, Let us First Confess

Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your religious act like religious. – Fulton J. Sheen

That quote by Sheen is what leads my column today over at Word on Fire, where I am following up on last week’s piece. As a reminder, that column suggested that the laity are being called to help the Church in a terrible moment.

Today’s piece is not as pleasant a read as last week’s, nor was it as easy to write, because in the midst of dreadful revelation none of us want to believe we have any measure of participation in these sins of the Church.

But, in a way, we do. And that might ultimately be a kind of terrible beauty if it leads us toward becoming a Church more united in our sense of common purpose, practices, and protections, with less distinction held between her people and her “princes”.

“But,” I can hear some ask fairly, “how could we have asked these questions if we did not know?”

The answer is, we couldn’t have, because—at least “officially”—we did not know. Diocesan councils led by layfolk have not been the norm.

But it’s only a partial answer. The truth is, most Catholics who are involved with the Church have, at some point, “heard things” or have been advised by other Catholics to be wary of Father So-and-So, or not permit their child to serve Mass with him.

In other words, we may not have “known” about the distressing behavior of many of our priests or bishops, but we had strong inklings, and sometimes more than that.

As a pretty standard-issue Catholic—one educated in a Catholic elementary system, brought up in the sacraments, and experienced in the sad-but-common “time away from the Church” that defines most Catholics—I have known all my life that amid our faithful and good priests there have always been a number of “bad” ones, those spiritually unhealthy and immature men who might have been good, had they been well-shepherded themselves, or who were wholly unsuited to the life and should never have been ordained.

I have known it because as a ten-year old, I endured a shattering, traumatic experience with a priest. My best friend (at a parish forty miles away) had a similar experience, only disclosed in adulthood.

I have known it because while volunteering at my parish I “heard” things about a (now deceased) priest I really liked, and I didn’t want them to be true.

I have known it because even as a perfect nobody within the church, I had heard all the rumors about Theodore McCarrick decades ago. If I heard them, I’m sure others did as well.

Yet I said nothing.

It’s fair to worry that if we’re looking into “rumors” things can devolve into a witch-hunt, but when rumors have become “established” it seems to me an inquiry into them would be an act of justice, not just for victims but for wrongly accused priests. It’s fair too, to be concerned that bringing layfolk into our policies and procedures may end up serving agendas, rather than truth. My hope is in a laity that is thoughtfully centrist.

As we discern how to proceed, we can immediately do two things:

  • Pray for our priests, by name when we can, every day and at every Mass.
  • Do penance for the sins of our Church, and be willing to suffer a bit for the sake of its restoration to spiritual health.

Some might balk at the notion of doing penance for the sins of our leadership, but “We are Church” and must therefore in all ways be the Church we want to see proceed from this day forth. When Joel called Judah to repentance he called the whole people

You can read the whole piece here.

While researching something yesterday, I was surprised to stumble on this, in Leviticus 4:3: When the high priest sins, he makes everyone else guilty, too. Yikes!

Next week, I’m going to write about what practical measure for the restoration of a Church in Crisis might look like. Pray for me on that.

Seriously, pray for me!

Image: WikimediaCommons