Posted on 07/17/2010 2:18:28 PM PDT by marshmallow
A July 9 editorial in The New York Times called upon Pope Benedict XVI to make the American bishops’ “zero tolerance” approach to sexual abuse binding on the worldwide Catholic church. In principle that’s a perfectly reasonable idea, especially since Vatican spokespersons routinely invoke the pope’s defense of the tough American rules as proof that he gets it.
Yet the editorial also used the word “shocking” to describe the fact that eight years after the American policies were developed, the pontiff has not yet imposed them on the rest of the world. That’s where people who know the lay of the land in the church will probably balk, because aside from the fact that Rome has an evolutionary sense of time (in which eight years seems a nanosecond), there are three other reasons why this is hardly a shocker.
Unpacking those reasons may shed light not only on the sexual abuse crisis, but also the complexities of setting policy in a global church -- one in which the 67 million Catholics in the United States represent just six percent of the total Catholic population of almost 1.2 billion, meaning that 94 percent of Catholics in the world don’t automatically see things through American eyes.
First, it’s a well-known fact of Catholic life that the “one strike and you’re out” rule at the heart of the American norms -- automatic removal from ministry for life for even one act of sexual abuse against a minor -- plays to mixed reviews, at best, around the global church. That’s not because the rest of the Catholic world is necessarily soft on abuse, but because some bishops and canon lawyers regard the “one strike” policy as a distortion of the church’s legal tradition. Over the centuries, they argue, canon law has resisted “one size fits all” penalties, preferring to leave discretion in the hands of judges to make the punishment fit the crime.
To illustrate the point, critics sometimes put things this way: There’s a world of difference between a priest who’s a serial rapist of pre-pubescent children, and a priest who had a consensual encounter with a teenager 20 years ago. Policies that ignore or downplay such distinctions, they argue, risk remedying one injustice with another.
The statute of limitations is another bone of contention. Canonists debate what it used to be, but everyone knows that today, the Vatican’s willingness to waive any time limit is heavily influenced by the American experience. That, too, draws fire from critics, who see it as a violation of due process of law. Statutes of limitations are there for a reason, they argue -- to protect the integrity of evidence, to ensure that justice is swift, and so on.
One can debate those points, but they reflect the views of many canon lawyers, religious superiors and bishops around the world. It’s not clear how effective it would be for the pope to impose a policy by fiat, when the officials who would have to enforce it harbor such reservations. In ecclesiological terms, one could also argue that it would violate the principle of collegiality, or shared decision-making, for the pope to decree a new law in the absence of a consensus among bishops and canonists. (As a footnote, critics these days sometimes seem to be demanding an imperial papacy ... calling to mind the old bit of advice, “Be careful what you wish for.”)
Second, there are aspects of what’s come to be known as the “American approach” which might not translate well in every corner of the world. Take, for example, cooperation with the police and other civil authorities. For Americans and Western Europeans -- where the rule of law holds, and the police play fair -- such a policy seems like a no-brainer, not to mention a long-overdue correction to the notion that the church is above the law.
Things look different, however, in a place such as Ukraine. There, a new pro-Russian government is reviving Soviet methods for pressuring the Greek Catholic Church, the largest Eastern rite Catholic church in the world and arguably Ukraine’s most important engine for democratic reform. Among other things, the successor to the KGB has recently been sniffing around the Catholic University in Lviv, dropping in on the rector and making ominous calls to staff on their cell phones (calls of the “we know where you live” variety).
Recently I asked a few figures in the Greek Catholic church what a requirement of automatic compliance with every police probe would mean in their environment today. Typically, I got a one-word answer: “Suicide.”
Ukraine’s situation illustrates a broader point. Policies which seem self-evident in one part of the world, and under one set of historical circumstances, can look very different when the context changes. (Recall that Benedict XVI’s choice in 2007 to become the Archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, was forced to quit in disgrace when it emerged that he had collaborated with Poland’s Soviet-era secret police. In that milieu, the guys who refused to play ball are now seen as heroes, while those who cooperated are pariahs.)
Third, anyone who has spent much time travelling around the Catholic world knows the love/hate dynamic that often defines reactions to the American church. On the one hand, Catholics elsewhere admire the dynamism, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the resources of American Catholicism; on the other, they often sense that Americans are a bit too eager to swoop in and tell the rest of the world how things ought to be done, sometimes with little understanding of the local situation.
In that context, anything that looks like shoving the “American way” down the throat of the rest of the church is destined to stir resistance. The Vatican has to be conscious of that bit of baggage too, to avoid making things worse in the name of making them better.
None of this, of course, disqualifies the approach worked out in the United States from informing new global rules on sex abuse, a process which to some extent is already underway. In a conference call with reporters on Thursday, Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, who serves as chair of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on the Protection of Children and Young People, argued that recent adjustments to canon law adopted by the Vatican not only build on the American norms, but in some respects go beyond them.
Even so, it’s worth remembering that setting policy for a global church is almost always more complicated than it might seem -- including, of course, how it might seem from a newsroom in New York.
Very good, John.
He might have added that this is on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the same critics are demanding a lesser role for the papacy and encouraging Catholics to ditch the Pope.
Pardon me while I laugh about the “American way.” It’s a total sham, applied by bishops only to people they don’t like, only when they want to do so, and conveniently not applied to anybody they do like.
Its easy to become enamoured with the idea of zero tolerance but setting standards and proving guilt often don’t fit well with zero tolerance.
Every time we see zero tolerance rules imposed, we see a lot of innocent punished along with the guilty. Think of the preschooler sent home for drawing a picture of a gun or the teenager expelled for giving a friend am asprin.
I’m not Catholic but I sympathize with the battle Catholics are fighting. Back in the late 80s a lot of primarily Baptist churches were raided due to allegations of whole congregations molesting children. Families were split up, churches were divided and closed but in the end, only a tiny fraction of the people affected were found to have done anything wrong.
Right near where I live some 29 children were removed from their homes. It was eventually determined that social workers were coaching small children to give the answers the prosecution wanted to hear.
The “American Way” under Obama is to put sodomites in charge of government school policies to make government schools more welcoming to pediphiles....oh...I mean middle-aged men who live alone and like to listen to Village People and Judy Garland recordings.
But the Pope said he was not “in charge” of the various dioceses that the Bishops are.. so maybe they should just do it..
that about summarizes it up.
And that doesn't even count false accusations, false memory syndrome, or someone who was a lover and now decides to cry rape.
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