In Peter Weir’s 1981 film Gallipoli, hundreds of Australian foot soldiers, armed only with bayonets, are sent, wave upon wave, into the machine-gun fire of Turkish troops. This depiction of one of the most infamous Allied defeats in World War I shows how a lethal combination of hubris, poor leadership, and a breakdown in trust and communication led to great loss of life and a stinging setback for the British military establishment.
The cutting down of soldiers in their prime is an apt metaphor for the morale of American Catholic priests since the Dallas Charter was introduced in 2002. After news reports showed numerous cases of episcopal inaction in the face of clerical sexual abuse of minors, the bishops’ response, following less than two days of discussion at their meeting in Dallas, jettisoned fundamental principles of fairness toward the accused. The stage was set for the situation now facing the Church in the United States: a collapse of morale among priests, a loss of trust in episcopal leadership, a nearly 25 percent decrease in seminarians and priestly ordinations over much of the last decade, and a growing sense that the rule of law does not mean much of anything inside the Church in the twenty-first century.
The 2022 National Study of Catholic Priests (NSCP) reports the alarming finding that 82 percent of priests fear being falsely accused of sexual abuse, and that the diocesan bishop is generally the last person to whom they would turn if they were in trouble. Still, the NSCP also reports that 77 percent of American Catholic priests are “flourishing.” Thus, one important question is how these two phenomena may be reconciled. Why do so many priests, who are otherwise flourishing in their ministries, mistrust bishops?
Someday, Deo volente, the full story of the sexual abuse crisis and its aftermath will be told. The story will include an analysis of how, for years, bishops refused to apply canon law to cases of sex abuse and instead relied on psychological experts. Those experts, voicing the medical wisdom of the day, assured them that after a little therapy, the perpetrators of sex crimes involving children could return to public ministry. (These experts, it must be stated, have never been held responsible for their supremely bad advice.) An equally important factor was the bishops’ misplaced emphasis on the Church as an institution with temporal interests rather than as the body of Christ, built on truth and dedicated to saving souls. In showing more concern for the Church’s financial health than for its fidelity to the Incarnate Word, many of its leaders betrayed the Good Shepherd, who, after all, promised to punish those who would allow any of his little ones to come to harm.
The full story of the crisis will also include an honest assessment of the role of Theodore McCarrick, the former cardinal archbishop of one of the most powerful cities on the planet. Before he was finally convicted of sexual misconduct in 2019 and expelled from the ministerial priesthood, McCarrick was not only a force within the global Catholic Church, but a major supporter of the Dallas Charter and its accompanying Essential Norms. He was not bothered by the objection voiced by many, in the U.S. and in Rome, that the rights of the accused to due process and the presumption of innocence were being trampled in the interest of political expediency. When it comes to priestly morale in twenty-first-century America, the most obvious issue is the atmosphere of almost complete lawlessness that ensues when a priest is accused.
The problem goes well beyond the publication of lists of “credibly accused” priests on the internet by dioceses and religious orders, a public relations technique condemned by the Holy See but used by the majority of American dioceses and religious orders. This manifestly unjust practice only skims the surface of what an accused priest must face the instant a complaint is made against him.
Elderly priests, with decades of service and spotless records, have been removed from public ministry in their final years. Simply being named in a civil complaint of some vague type of misconduct in the 1970s or 1980s leads to severe emotional harm as well as financial stress—not to mention missed golden anniversary celebrations, awkward absences from the weddings and baptisms of family and friends, and even denials of requests to celebrate the funerals of family members.
Or consider the middle-aged priests who, perhaps overwhelmed by the demands of their vocation, develop sinful habits (gambling, alcohol abuse, anger mismanagement, sexual relations with consenting women). Whereas in prior years such vices were handled by internal Church discipline, today they often come under the same regime that arbitrates child sex abuse allegations. Results may include an abrupt and public removal of the priest from his office, a long period of episcopal inaction, a forced stay in a psychological institution, and drastic restrictions on the priest’s public exercise of his ministry. These disproportionate responses from bishops (acting under the “zero risk is best” counsel of their lawyers and insurance companies) often mean the premature end of a priest’s ministry.
Finally, consider the young priests, newly ordained and eager to begin their ministry, who are told that acts they committed before they were ordained have somehow rendered them unfit. Even when complainants and current harm are lacking, and regardless of what canon law has to say on the matter, the mere appearance of toleration for sinful conduct must be stamped out. Evidently, those who retroactively apply current standards of conduct are unaware of how unfair such a principle is, let alone how much it conflicts with the Church’s teaching on the forgiveness of sins.
Thomas G. Guarino tackles these issues in “A House Divided: The Dallas Charter’s Role in Fracturing Priest-Bishop Relations.” His essay forms an incisive chapter in an otherwise uneven volume, Rebuilding Trust: Clergy Morale in the Wake of the Abuse Crisis, edited by Brandon Vaidyanathan, Sara Perla, and Stephen P. White. Guarino addresses the “chasm” between American priests and their bishops. He blames this “grave and disturbing ‘disconnect’” on the “draconian implementation” of the Dallas Charter and its Essential Norms. He recalls Avery Cardinal Dulles’s prophecy in 2004 that the “harsh and unyielding” approach described in these documents would lead to an “adversarial relationship” between bishops and priests, and that the adoption of “easy slogans” such as “zero tolerance” contradicted the bishops’ own teaching on the prosecution of crimes and the treatment of human beings accused of criminal misconduct.
Guarino then picks apart the most glaring weaknesses of the bishops’ post-Dallas approach, including the widespread use of nebulous phrases such as “credibility,” the disproportionality between offenses and their punishments, and the disappearance of fundamental legal concepts such as statutes of limitation. He describes abuses of due process and makes the careful observation that the “well-meaning Charter—while undoubtedly achieving important and critical accomplishments—has also done unfortunate damage to the Catholic Church in the United States,” largely because of the way it has been implemented.
Guarino’s analysis, curiously described as “trenchant, even controversial” by the book’s editors, provides a welcome antidote to the anodyne description of the Charterin the introductory chapter of Rebuilding Trust. If the Charter is a “landmark reform in the Church’s handling of sexual abuse,” nevertheless it is wreaking structural damage on the institution it is intended to reform. Not all landmarks are improvements.
The editors largely ignore the significance of the fact that neither the Charter nor the Norms ever uses, let alone defines, “credible accusation.” As that vague but ubiquitous phrase has undermined the rights of the accused for more than twenty years, it deserves serious scrutiny. The same could be said of its kindred terms, the “substantiated” and “established” accusations. None of these three terms exists in canon law, which like all legitimate legal systems relies on precise terminology and procedures to secure fundamental rights. After all, canon law aims to assist flawed human beings in determining the truth (or falsity) of a given allegation with as much certainty as is possible in this fallen world. Too often, such principles are brushed off as “legal technicalities” that “get in the way” of protecting children.
Likewise, “permanent removal” from priestly ministry is a problematic concept, both legally and theologically. Catholic teaching is clear that once a man is ordained, he is a priest “forever, according to the order of Melchizedek” (Ps. 110:4), and the title holder of certain rights and duties under ecclesiastical law. Consequently, he cannot be “removed” from all public priestly ministry, let alone be returned to the lay state, unless and until a penal process has taken place according to Church law. Even the temporary withdrawal from ministry, a common-sense provision foreseen in canon 1722 and denoted by the Latin term arcere, suffered a mistranslation as “remove” in early versions of the Essential Norms. The translation has been corrected, but the animus behind the error lives on, poisoning the wording of the typical notice announcing a priest’s “removal” or leading to the imposition of drastic restrictions on his life and ministry just hours after the lodging of an accusation, before he has had an opportunity to exercise his right of defense.
Sadly typical, again, is the editors’ uncritical assessment of reports authored by various state attorneys general. This includes the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report from 2018, which arose from an investigation overseen by the then-attorney general (now governor) Josh Shapiro. That report is described by the editors as documenting “more than a thousand cases of abuse by over 300 priests across six dioceses over a 70-year period.” Former New York Times religion columnist Peter Steinfels has documented the faults of the Pennsylvania report, the purpose of which was evidently less to protect children than to provide yet another opportunity for the fashionable denigration of the Catholic Church. Tellingly, of the 301 stories of abuse described in graphic detail by the Pennsylvania Grand Jury, only two resulted in indictments.
The Catholic Church in the United States must face up to the institutional sins of its past while resisting the demands of popular opinion enflamed by a moral panic. Only then will the Church regain her stature as the mirror of justice and assure her faithful—especially her priests—of her return to the rule of law and some sense of justice. No institution can long survive when its frontline troops are being sent to slaughter.
