Vos Estis and The Failure of the Institutional Church

 This week was a big week in the world of justice for victims of abuse in the Church, albeit not in the way many envision.  On Tuesday, Bishop Michael Hoeppner, at the request of the Vatican, resigned as Bishop of the Diocese of Crookston.  While the exact reasons are undisclosed, it is generally understood this resignation came as a result of the Vos Estis investigation into his conduct regarding how abuse was handled in the diocese.  Since it was a voluntary (in the technical sense) resignation, Bishop Hoeppner maintains his status as a bishop in good standing, just a retired one.  

In his first public act since that resignation, Bishop Hoeppner..... threw himself a going away party.  I'm not kidding.  He literally had a farewell Mass where he rode into the sunset a hero, a faithful servant of the diocese who reflected on how the past few years brought him joy.  It also brought him grievous neglect of abuse and potential obstruction of justice, but mostly joy.  That joy was mostly shared by the bishop, not the victims of abuse, or not the people he bullied into keeping silent or in whose testimony he coerced them into recanting.  It is easily the most disgraceful action of a US Bishop (maybe even a bishop in the entire Church) of the past decade, and is surpassed only by Theodore McCarrick declaring victory over the abuse scandal while he explicitly drew up procedures that would ensure he could not be investigated over the very abuse he had committed.  (He was later investigated privately by Rome of course.)

To put it bluntly, Bishop Hoeppner is a disgrace.  He concluded his time by stating once he left Minnesota, he would move to a "warmer climate."  The response of the people of God should be unequivocal:  unless you repent, that warmer climate is Hell.  Yet his was not the only disgrace this week.  In Cincinnati, a Bishop who was forced to resign his post (albeit an auxiliary one) due to negligence regarding abuse was.....  appointed pastor of two Churches.  A man whose conduct regarding abuse was so shameful he had to step down will now govern parishes, where questions of abuse may have to be answered.  Yet once again, since it was a resignation, this bishop had all the usual faculties and expectations a bishop would have.

These two genuine scandals are a reminder that for all the hoop-la, Vos Estis was a missed opportunity.  You may be of the school of thought represented by the likes of JD Flynn, who views Vos Estis a significant step forward in the Church as it progresses on a path to accountability.  Now I respect Flynn, whose reporting on a lot of these issues has done a real service to the Church.  If his reporting is first rate on this, his analysis and comprehension of the problem badly misses the mark.  Vos Estis isn't a step forward, it was a gigantic missed opportunity.  The events of the past week have demonstrated this for all to see.

Why was Vos Estis a missed opportunity?  It was a missed opportunity in that it mostly ignored the abuse crisis in the Church, instead trying to focus on one very narrow aspect:  the process by which a bishop can be investigated, and who would conduct that investigation.  This came in the wake of the McCarrick scandal, where (so the narrative goes) the Church was unaware of the acts McCarrick had committed because there was no mechanism in place to trigger an investigation into a bishop.  Vos Estis carried the assumption that everything else regarding how abuse is adjudicated (from accusation to legal sentence if applicable) was otherwise functioning, with maybe a few reforms being needed here or there.

On this account, yes, there has been certain progress.  As a result of Vos Estis, there are now investigations into Bishops that (potentially) would not have happened otherwise.  Yet there are a lot of unanswered questions.  Was the thoroughness of this investigation on account of the one conducting it, or the procedural infrastructure in place Vos Estis provides?  We don't really know because we do not have access to the investigation itself.  There is no report required of such an investigation for public investigation.  Some kind of report was presented to the Holy Father, we presume.  While this is presented as meaningful.... is it?  McCarrick was investigated by Rome as far back as the 1990's, and eventually given private restrictions as a result.  Bishop Hart in North Dakota was investigated by Rome, and given private restrictions as a result of that investigation.  In 2018, Ines San Martin reported that sources showed her 5 such bishops since Benedict's pontificate alone that had been subject of such an investigation.  That such investigations are taking place is not a meaningful improvement.

In the grand scheme of things, Vos Estis has changed nothing.  Nothing has to happen because of an investigation launched under Vos Estis beyond it must be concluded by a certain time and information presented to the Holy Father.  There is nothing that clearly defines when an investigation is finished, nor what happens next as a result of that investigation.  In this regard, it is just like the Church before Vos Estis.  Vos Estis did not mandate that if the investigation uncovered anything deemed credible, that you were automatically subject to a formal canonical process.  It said nothing about your status during this investigation, what you could or could not do.  Some bishops have stepped aside entirely, whereas others have simply said they will not handle any abuse cases.  If you are resigned/and or deposed as a result of that investigation, there is no indication of what your status or expectations will be going forward as a bishop.  Instead we get a mostly ad-hoc private system of arrangements, where you are convinced to fall on your sword for the good of the institution.  How is this any different from before?

I submit this is what individuals like Flynn fail to grasp, often because of their background.  Flynn has a background in working for the bureaucracy of the Church.  He is an institutionalist, and I do not mean that as an insult.  He has an understanding of how the bureaucracy of the Church functions in a way most of us never could, and he has insight into how it plays into the mission of the Church overall the outsider is simply incapable of possessing.  Yet this can come with some blinders, or at least some trade offs.  Things that the institutionalist finds self evident often are not.  These assumptions can often find its way into legislation and policy, and I think that is what has happened here.  Vos Estis assumed that the Church is for the most part credible in dealing with accusations of abuse, and the motu proprio was a document meant to buttress that credibility, to improve the process.

I don't think that understanding matches reality.  The reality is the Church has zero credibility on adjudicating abuse, and the hierarchy, from the Pope on down, simply isn't trusted by the laity or even many of the clergy themselves on these matters.  That is different from adopting a sort of total depravity where every cleric is rotten or corrupt.  Several are no doubt trying to do good.  Yet the problem is that they are not trusted by the wider Church, nor does the Church give a reason to place such trust in them.  That's a hard thing for someone who has worked in the bureaucracy for years to grasp.

The problem with the way the Church handles abuse is that it does not do so in an intelligible, rational, or thorough way.  Vos Estis was mostly a reactive action to stop the bleeding in the wake of the McCarrick scandal, not an attempt to honestly grapple with why the institutional Church had failed so spectacularly with McCarrick.  That would have determined the failure owed to a system of mostly ad-hoc processes made arbitrarily by a small group of individuals (often just the Pope) with zero transparency or zero layers of accountability.  With everything so centralized, everything from the investigation to the sentence could be filtered through various lenses of optics and politics, and someone who was a master manipulator could game that system to either stay out of trouble, or minimize the trouble he was in.  Theodore McCarrick was precisely such a master manipulator, who exposed a system whose problems had always been there.  Vos Estis mostly left this system untouched, as all real power is still centralized, and there are precious little parts of transparency or accountability involved.  The only way one even knows such an investigation takes place is if a journalist convinces a source to leak its existence!

Vos Estis didn't fix anything because it didn't take a serious look at the problem, and that was by design.  The individuals who implemented Vos Estis think that outside of a few problems here or there, the system mostly works.  What I'm trying to say is don't listen to what the Institutionalists will tell you:  until we see a more holistic reform, you will have more Bishop Hoeppners.