The Impact of the Scandal
With 700 journalists on hand to serve as a media lynch mob, the USCCB (as by then it was called) was under intense pressure to act. The result was a tough new zero-tolerance policy on sex abuse — in essence, the policy that's now in place.
In fact, though, the bishops had been struggling with the problem of sex abuse since the late 1980s. In 1993 they adopted a sound set of guidelines for dioceses to follow in dealing with the issue. Unfortunately, like most things the conference did then and does now, compliance by diocesan bishops was voluntary. Many bishops followed the guidelines, but some did not. Nearly all kept things under wraps.
Had they told their people what was going on, it's unlikely the crisis that erupted nine years later would have been the disaster it turned out to be. Here was a case in which the Church would have been well-served by a stronger bishops' conference empowered to knock episcopal heads together, not a weaker one.
Even as matters stood, without the USCCB the bishops in 2002 would have found themselves in worse straits than they did. Lacking a national organization, they would have had no mechanism for hammering out a joint policy and negotiating its acceptance by the Vatican. The notion that the Holy See somehow would have saved the day has little to recommend it, considering its head-in-the-sand approach to sex abuse for years before the crisis blew up.
Framing a policy on sexual derelictions under intense pressure may not be quite what the Second Vatican Council had in mind in saying bishops' conferences were needed for “the common good of the Church,” but this illustration of the USCCB's fundamental usefulness will do until a better one comes along.
The Rush to Restructure
Besides coinciding with the current effort to restructure the bishops' conference, the sex-abuse scandal helped bring it about. There are several ironies here.
One early reaction to the scandal in 2002 was a suggestion floated by several bishops to convene a new plenary council — the fourth in US Church history and the first since 1884 — to take a searching look at American Catholicism.
Clerics, religious, and lay people would have been the bishops' collaborators. The hierarchy pondered that proposal for more than two years, mostly behind closed doors, then quietly gave a collective shrug of indifference and dropped it. Instead, they pushed ahead with the restructuring of the USCCB via an introspective process involving no one but themselves. Although the Church in the United States badly needs transparency in decision-making at every level in the wake of the sex-abuse scandal, the bishops evidently want no part of it.
The genesis of the restructuring goes back to the eve of the scandal. At the USCCB general meeting of November 2001, bishops complained that even though money problems were forcing them to cut spending in their dioceses, spending by the USCCB remained untouched. As a result, $464,000 was trimmed from the organization's 2002 budget.
The tokenism wasn't enough. In late 2003 the bishops created a Task Force on Activities and Resources chaired by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl, then-bishop of Pittsburgh and now archbishop of Washington, DC. The task force produced an influential November 2004 report whose message was that the bishops needed to start doing less and doing it better. The most important recommendation was to set clear priorities and take on only new projects that fit them.
Simple as that sounds, lack of such an obvious rule of thumb in the past repeatedly led the episcopal conference down the primrose path of trying to be all things to everyone.
At that point responsibility passed to the USCCB Committee on Priorities and Plans. Its chairman is Archbishop Michael J. Sheehan of Santa Fe, who as an assistant general secretary of the NCCB/USCC in the early 1970s served under the general secretary of that day, Joseph Bernardin; the vice chairman is Bishop Dennis M. Schnurr of Duluth, Minnesota, conference treasurer, who was general secretary from 1995 to 2001.
A Plan without a Vision?
Several things have happened since then. Acting at the recommendation of the Sheehan committee, the bishops last year approved four USCCB priorities: marriage and family; “faith formation for all” that emphasizes “the sacraments and Mass attendance”; priestly and religious vocations; and pro-life activities. Those are hardly the only areas in which the USCCB of the future will be involved, but they're meant as guidance in allocating resources.
The budget also has been changing, with more change to come.
The 2006 USCCB budget calls for $131,177,251 in spending, but the figure is misleading inasmuch as $41 million is government funding to the conference migration office for resettlement work, while another $57 million represents the intake from national collections that's disbursed to needy dioceses and presumably worthy projects. The core of the operating budget is $11,857,771 in money that bishops take from diocesan funds. The figure hasn't risen in three of the last four years, a circumstance that required withdrawal of $1.8 million from conference reserves to pay the bills this year.
Since drawing down reserves is a self-limiting practice, and the bishops, financially hard-pressed back home, aren't about to raise the ante in Washington, that means cutbacks ahead. Further guaranteeing that is a proposed 16 percent reduction in the diocesan assessments. Current figures for some of the USCCB's higher-visibility offices include Social Development and World Peace, $2,759,081; Pro-Life, $2,336,283; General Counsel, $1,909,800; and Government Liaison, $993,895. The Child Youth and Protection Office and the National Review Board established to monitor implementation of the bishops' policy on sex abuse operate on $759,021; the bishops' Committee for the Protection of Children and Young People gets another $67,528.
An essential part of the restructuring is to unravel the web of bishops' committees that grew up over the years and now feeds confusion, duplication of effort, and waste. The plan before the bishops in Baltimore calls for cutting program committees from 35 to 14, with 16 ad hoc committees eliminated entirely. This cutback is to happen largely by combining committees now operating in the same general area into one.
Staff numbers are also on the way down. Exclusive of the migration office and Catholic News Service, which have outside funding sources and relatively large staffs, the plan envisages a reduction from 240 positions to a new total of 175.
The USCCB's current general secretary, Msgr. David J. Malloy, is under instructions to bring the bishops a detailed staffing plan next spring. Along with a money-saving reduction in the number of salaried employees, the aim is to foster flexibility by making it possible to shift personnel from task to task as needed instead of allowing staffers to hunker down in their narrow-purpose bureaucratic cubbyholes.
What does it all mean for the conference of bishops and the Church? Episcopal conferences aren't optional — they are mandated in Church law. But no law says they have to get as bloated and self-important as the American conference became over the years, when it sometimes seemed to consider itself a kind of super-diocese giving orders to dioceses and acting as a counterweight to the Vatican. (Still, those who may rejoice to see the USCCB getting its comeuppance should bear in mind that when push came to shove in the greatest crisis of American Catholicism in modern times — the sex-abuse scandal — not only did the USCCB step forward and clean up the most visible part of the mess but, given a stronger hand much earlier in the game, it might actually have prevented a lot of the grief.)
As some see it, though, there's a basic problem with the USCCB restructuring plan: lack of vision — for the conference of bishops and also for the Church. Had the bishops decided to convene a plenary council, that project, like many another of the last 40 years, might have turned out badly; but with a lot of luck and the involvement of the Holy Spirit, it could have supplied the institutional Church in America with something it desperately needs — that indefinable entity George H.W. Bush once famously called “the vision thing.” Add that to your list of what-ifs.
The main hope of conference insiders is that that vision will be forthcoming when Francis Cardinal George of Chicago, USCCB vice president and widely regarded as the brightest member of the American hierarchy, succeeds Bishop Skylstad as president two years from now. The great imponderable in that scenario is the cardinal's health: He had surgery for bladder cancer last summer.
The USCCB veteran quoted earlier sums up the situation like this: Sobered by the sex-abuse scandal, the American bishops are chastened and worried. Things they worry about these days include the decline in Sunday Mass attendance (two out of three Catholics in the 1960s; one out of three today); a similar drop-off in sacramental practice, with penance and matrimony especially hard hit; the growing shortage of priests; the religious illiteracy of the laity; the immense challenge of integrating a huge number of Hispanic newcomers into the Catholic community — and ever so much else. “They don't want it said that American Catholicism collapsed on their watch,” this person said of the bishops.
Even without a clear vision, restructuring the USCCB could conceivably help prevent that by making the conference more of a resource to local churches in their efforts to meet escalating pastoral needs. Better late than never if it does. Meanwhile, on to Baltimore.
Russell Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington, DC, and was information director of the NCCB/USCCB from 1969-1987. You can email him at RShaw10290@aol.com.
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(This article originally appeared in Crisis Magazine and is used by permission.)
The Impact of the Scandal