The USCCB: What's the Point?

So the USCCB is having their annual meeting, conducted online this year because of the pandemic.  As I watch some of the highlights and read the commentary, I'm left asking a question:  Why are we doing this?  I don't mean doing it virtually because of the pandemic.  I mean:  why does the USCCB exist?

This sounds like a flippant question, but it isn't.  What is the point of the USCCB?  Why do they exist?  What are they hoping to accomplish?  To drive home the point further:  if the USCCB disbanded today, at this very moment, what would we find lacking?

So far as I can tell, the USCCB, as currently setup, exists to do three things.  They are to be pundits, to promote factional warfare, and to form committees.  This came out with the greatest clarity during the discussion around The McCarrick report.  If all you knew about the report was what you heard at the USCCB, you would think the report was a debate between the legacies of the three Popes McCarrick served under.  So a report that detailed a decades long institutional coverup of criminal sexual assault was reduced to the rather pathetic dueling arguments over some bishops thinking Francis should resign, or if the media is unfair to the legacy of John Paul II.  There is a lot of talk about "seeing through the eyes of victims", but nothing about various policies they could put in place to make this a reality.  Cardinal Gregory talks about the importance of showing victims we get it, but he sits on all the information that details the American Churches own institutional knowledge of McCarricks predations, and refuses to do anything to release it.  The bishops never once discussed how it was possible for such a monster to become so powerful and walk among their ranks, and no discussion about what steps they were taking as a body to prevent a future McCarrick from doing this kind of damage again.  Instead it was an argument over which pope deserves more blame.  That's an argument you should read on the internet, if you should read it at all.

Likewise, on the coronavirus pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the importance of getting people back to Church, yet nothing about why people are so reluctant to return.  Is it a question of safety?  Then what extra precautions are we taking?  Is it because people felt abandoned during the pandemic?  How are we fixing that?  Is it because of the corruption in the Church?  What are we doing to fix that?  Has the faith stopped becoming relevant for so many who before were going to Mass?  Instead, we're talking about holding special "bring your friend to Mass" days

This is not an ideological talking point, ie the bishops aren't trad enough, aren't progressive enough, whatever.  Nor is this a belief that things like a Committee on Racism are pointless.  There's a lot to discuss about the history of how the Church has navigated racial tensions across the world and in our own backyard, and yes, how that navigation has been poor or imperfect.  We should have nothing to fear from that.  Yet what exactly is done by the USCCB that makes it serve a singular and unique purpose?  If it's really just "its a high profile chance to discuss these issues" then maybe we really should rethink the entire premise upon which these episcopal conferences exist and function.

To the Tiber With All of Them

Note:  The following contains very angry language, because anger about this issue is important.

Yesterday, Rome finally released their "McCarrick Report", or, if you prefer a "Report on the Holy See's Institutional Knowledge and Decision Making Process Related to Former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick."  I already said what I thought the report would outline, and I was mostly right.  If Rome thought the report would answer these questions, they were mistaken.  Fr. Ryan Hilderbrand listed almost 30 questions he had about the report that Rome doesn't answer.  

There is a lot to the report, but I think we can focus on a few overall points

Benign Neglect or Active Indifference?

The first is that there was a narrative that McCarrick, ever the cunning schemer, was able to hide everything from Rome.  This has turned out to be 100% false.  Rome was well aware of allegations regarding McCarrick, having received up to 4 different allegations of abuse, violation of boundaries, or inappropriate behavior on behalf of the Cardinal by the time action was finally taken against him.  How did he then rise up the ranks despite all this being known?  

I think the best explanation is that nobody wanted to look really closely what was going on, because if they looked they knew they were going to find something.  Its like the person who knows their spouse is being unfaithful, or they know their spouse has a drinking problem.  They go out of their way to avoid seeing all the warning signs that would force them to take action.  Theodore McCarrick was charismatic, a smart politician, and a prodigious fundraiser.  Just like Marcel Maicel, he wasn't particularly subtle with hiding his abuse.  There was just overwhelming incentives to not look too closely.  If you aren't looking closely, you don't have to look the other way at wrongdoing.

This was combined with an active weaponization of the Church against opposition to McCarrick.  For example, when McCarrick was promoted to the Archdiocese of Washington, an investigation was conducted regarding abuse, but it was an investigation to be conducted "without urgency."  Yet this investigation was completed, and alongside numerous other pieces of evidence, it was suggested that McCarrick not be transferred to another see.  One can take the at face reasons listed, but another way of looking at it was it was believed promoting McCarrick to a higher position would bring about greater visibility.  This suggestion was ignored by the Pope who then bypassed the normal process of consulting the Congregation of Bishops and the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.  (Then Josef Ratzinger, the future Benedict XVI who punished McCarrick.)  You engage in this type of bypass because you don't want anyone looking too closely at the situation.

The Bureaucratization of Abuse

One of the striking features of the report, as well as the evidence contained therein, is how bureaucratic it is.  At no point does one detect a sense of anger or outrage at McCarrick, either over his crimes, or over having been deceived.  One could even be forgiven individuals believe a crime was committed here.  There are jokes and light hearted banter mentioned, a warm comity and rapport with everyone involved.  Even McCarrick's enemies (and they do make appearances in this report) seem more troubled by the extra paperwork this unfortunate set of events generates.  It suggests that, far from this being an isolated incident, these kind of abuse investigation and rumors regarding senior prelates seem strikingly common, to the point where its impact seems fairly trivial in the proceedings.  Maybe this just the soulless boardroom mentality seeping into the Church.  Or maybe it points to a striking frequency of these allegations.  Either way, it is something deeply troubling.  As always here, the protection of the institution matters above all else.  A primacy of attention is given to if McCarrick's indiscretions and allegations would impact a papal trip, rather than terrify and scandalize the flock he governed.

The Complication of Papal Legacies

Make no mistake, this report is a haymaker to the face of Pope John Paul II's legacy.  If he were not already canonized, there would not be a snowballs chance in hell he would be canonized.  From a doctrinal standpoint, this does not invalidate his canonization.  Saints can have serious blindspots, they can be gullible, be deceived, and they can make catastrophic mistakes.  Sometimes you could even say understanding those mistakes is essential to understanding the saint in question.  Yet let us not kid ourselves: this is going to impact the legacy of John Paul II negatively for centuries, and it should.  Benedict is less Der Panzerkardinal and more a weak and ineffectual man, who takes half measures because taking full measures would torch the legacy of his yet uncanonized predecessor he owed his career to and damage the institution's reputation he spent decades trying to uphold.  It is the dark side of institutionalism.

Axing the Final Chapter

One could ask how this reflects upon Pope Francis, but he is largely absent in this story.  For all intents and purposes, the McCarrick saga ends in 2009, with a brief epilogue in 2017 where WHOOPS TURNS OUT MCCARICK IS A PEDOPHILE HOLY CRAP GUYS WHAT DO WE DO?  At this point everyone puts on their shocked face and expresses disbelief that the guy they had under "prescript" (where he is forced to only live in certain areas, restricted from doing almost everything but don't you dare call it a "punishment" or "sentence") for borderline consensual/nonconsensual sexual activity engaged in nonconsensual sexual activity, and oops, turns out those rumors we've heard for decades about abusing minors were true, who woulda guessed?  Though they admit McCarrick gave advice that various individuals be appointed bishops and to other Vatican organizations, and that he gave people a lot of monetary gifts impossible to trace since it was cash, we swear this activity had no influence on anything.  They aren't trying to convince us of that fact, they're practicing their defense when they appear before Christ at the Judgement Seat.  He will be as impressed by it as we are.

A Very Online Report

The report seems written less to explain McCarrick's rise than it is to take sides in various factional disputes within the Church.  Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano is a frequent antagonist in the report.  Vigano was the man whose whistle blowing testimony forced McCarrick to be laicized and forced the eventual publishing of this report.   One should readily grant whistleblowers are not ideal figures.  They are normally vain corrupt individuals who have been double crossed by someone more vain and corrupt.  That's what happened here.  In an attempt to mollify his base being angry over a papal trip to America, Francis pinned everything that went poorly on Vigano, and told everyone he fired him to try and generate good PR with his biggest fans.  (In truth, he resigned as was customary, without prompting from the Holy Father.)  Vigano, always a man to treat the slightest provocation as a declaration of holy war, waited until the perfect moment to exact his revenge, and the McCarrick scandal was that perfect moment.  So the report looks to portray him in as bad a light as possible, such as faulting him for not examining how much legal liability they would have from McCarrick's indiscretions after he was forcibly restricted from ministry.  (Note not whether or not the charges were true, Rome had a pretty good idea they were.  Just how much legal liability this threatened to ensnare everyone in.)

Now if this seems very inside basbeall:  no kidding.  The average Catholic does not give a damn about any of this, much less people outside the Church.  Yet the report is filled with these little anectdotes of factional bloodfeuds.  This wasn't written to shed light on a situation. This was written to provide a narrative for one side of a bitter factional struggle in the Church to present as a way to justify everything that has happened up until now.  The various debates about various personalities might rage on twitter, but all anyone else will see is "sure looks like the past three popes knew one of their senior advisors was a sexual abuser and moved heaven and earth to avoid doing anything about it."

Will He Find Faith?

Christ asks "When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith?"  I thought about that a lot lately.  We spend a lot of time in today's Church about who is more faithful to her traditions, to her doctrine.  Critics of traditionalism complain of a Catholicism that is "More Catholic than the Pope."  I think this is the wrong way of looking at it.  There's something for everyone in this report.  We see some very casual misogyny.  We see liberals acting bad.  Conservatives acting bad.  Everyone of every ideological persuasion uniting to make sure nobody has to look too hard at what McCarrick is doing.  All of these people are baptized Catholics.  Yet we have to ask:  do any of them have faith in God?  Do any of these people have a relationship with Christ?  Or is the Catholic Church just a book of the month club, where the doctrinal debates are over which list of books gets promoted by the group?  While the Pope has criticized this mentality in the past, it's clear that its accelerated under his watch.  For all the talk of the importance of Jesus, one has to ask where Jesus fits into their understanding of how McCarrick was treated in the Church.  How often did they think about pleasing and serving Jesus when they deliberated over what to do?  The McCarrick saga is a case of the Vatican under the past three popes losing the plot.

Barring penance and confession, anyone involved in this sordid affair, from the bottom to the top, should be denied a Catholic burial.  That's the charitable solution.  Otherwise, let God cast them down from their roles, and after a lifetime of penance, let them be cast into the Tiber.

The Isolation of Pope Francis

 While Americans have been paying attention to the political election season, events in the Catholic Church have moved very fast, and are moving faster still.  In the last two months we have seen:

- The Pope drove his former Number 2 (Cardinal Angelo Becciu) out of respectable Church life

- Several criminal investigations are revealed or started involving senior Vatican officials and financial officials regarding financial transactions Becciu had control over.  If you believe Becciu, these deals were done with the knowledge and blessing of the Pope.  (whatever that may or may not entail.)

- The Pope released an instruction regarding who can start religious communities, in yet another shot across the bow at the German Church that he is getting a little fed up with their years of rebellion.

- The Pope took punitive steps against an elderly Polish Bishop credibly accused of abuse, in what is almost certainly not going to be the last in that country.

- In a dramatic reversal of fortune, the Pope kinda blew up his curial reform this week, by defanging a lot of the power in his own Secretariat of State.  Its immense financial control (that was meant to go with other sweeping powers) was greatly reduced, as the Pope largely adopted the same reforms that Cardinal Pell proposed (and he rejected) in 2013, a process that began Pell's ouster in the game of court intrigue in the Vatican. The Secretariat of State was long seen as Becciu's primary protector, and rumors swirl that Becciu acted in concert with him on many of those arrangements now under question.

- The Vatican has announced it will finally be releasing the long awaited "McCarrick" report, or, if you prefer the soulless bureaucratic legalese typical of the Vatican, the  "Report on the Holy See’s institutional knowledge and decision-making process related to former Cardinal Theodore Edgar McCarrick."

There will be a lot of discussion about what each of these individuals moves do and don't mean.  What I'd like to propose is that they point to an increasingly isolated Pope, a man who, after years, is being forced to take actions he has stubbornly refused to do, because he now has no choice.  The first myth to dispel is that this is business as usual.  Something is clearly on the horizon, something the Pope is desperately trying to get out in front of and manage.

The various financial scandals are almost entirely his own fault.  It must be noted, Cardinal Pell outlined a series of reforms to prevent precisely the situation the Pope currently finds himself in.  Pell examined a financial system that was ripe for corruption and abuse.  He proposed a series of reforms that would greatly reduce that risk.  The Pope rejected those reforms, and then sidelined Pell.  This was before Pell's accusation, conviction, and then reversal regarding sexual abuse.  The Vatican's ability to participate in international finance with ease is now at risk, requiring these reforms which feel less like part of an overall plan, and more a panicked emergency response.

The situation with Germany is again mostly of his own doing.  While Rome and Germany have been in tension the last several decades, they believed Francis was going to be the pope who helped them accomplish a revolution.  The Pope, at best playing politics, took no steps to discourage that thinking, and encouraged quite a bit of it.  He now finds himself unable to put that genie back in the bottle.  The Germans feel, not without merit, that Francis owes them his pontificate.  Francis feels, not without merit, that he is the Bishop of Rome, and nobody's puppet.  The Pope could have put a stop to this earlier with decisive action.  Now that window for action has passed, and he's mostly engaging in a desperate series of interventions and emergency instructions, trying to keep the situation from Germany erupting into a full blown schism.

Finally, the issues of sexual abuse, and Theodore McCarrick in particular, are again his own fault.  McCarrick was quietly forced out of public ministry by Pope Benedict, and placed under what amounted to a permanent interdict as punishment for his canonical crimes.  A punishment Francis unmistakably lifted, even if it is believed for a good reason.  The Pope honestly probably reasoned McCarrick was an old man whose ability to harm the Church was passed, and besides, he could use McCarrick to craft the greatest legacy of any pope in centuries:  a deal with China.  That, like everything else, blew up in his face.  While the case of McCarrick casts a rather poor light on the last two pontificates, it is no doubt a black eye on Francis, especially since he denied any knowledge of the abuse (a claim nobody believes and something he will almost certainly have to walk back, at least implicitly, this week), and allowed it to be perpetuated by his courtiers (chief among them the head of the Congregation of Bishops) that McCarrick wasn't even actually suspended for abuse, something he knew was a lie.

The revelation of McCarrick's abuse was always going to be a scandal.  Yet they could have pointed to McCarrick's suspension from ministry, his forced exile from public life, and the Pope's desire to continue to enforce those decrees, except for the fact Pope Francis himself intervened to end that.  Nobody believes McCarrick would travel around the world after all those years of exile without Rome's knowledge, blessing, and invitation.  It is almost certain that the report released this week will avoid answering the hard questions about the Pope's knowledge complicity in this whole affair.  To the extent he is forced to accept blame, he will no doubt deflect it upon others as much as possible, as any leader would do in a crisis.  Yet this report is again being released because Francis has no choice.  It would have to be released eventually, and dioceses in America are rapidly going bankrupt.  Withholding accountability on McCarrick, even a half-hearted accountability, is not sustainable for the long run.

All of this points to the isolation the Pope currently finds himself in.  He is isolated on potential moves he can make.  He has been attempting to manage each of these crises the past several years, and has failed to manage all three.  Leadership that would have been welcomed at first is now almost certainly viewed as desperation.  The allies he has have also been substantially reduced.  Due to the fact he is still Pope, he will not have many open critics in the clergy.  Yet he has fewer and fewer defenders, and that list shrinks by the day.

I write this not with a sense of glee, but of sadness, and a bit of sympathy for the Pope.  I firmly believe that, in healthier times, he would certainly not be a great pope, but he would not be a terrible one either.  Yet we do not live in healthier times.  We also have a pandemic raging through the Church, one in which he has managed quite well so far, all things expected.  Its going to be increasingly hard to effectively stand up for the pastoral care of souls during this pandemic, a cause Francis has made dear to his heart.  It will be difficult mostly because he himself has made it difficult.

This is why prayer for the Holy Father is necessary, even more so this coming week.  His role in his own ensnarement is true enough, but we can all think of a time where we caused a bad situation to rapidly deteriorate, and the weight it put on us.  Now multiply that weight by the spiritual care of a billion souls.  Maybe now, at this late hour, the Pope will make the turn he should have made at the beginning:  to the Lord in prayer, that He give him the courage to carry out, even at this late hour, what is necessary.