On the multifaceted and polyvalent crisis in the Church today

I remember when senior officials from the then-newly created Secretariat for Communication of the Holy See—later restyled the “Dicastery” for Communication—came to do a meet-and-greet at The Thing That Used To Be Vatican Radio.

It was 2016 or thereabouts, and I was a seasoned veteran on the English news desk. The organizers had styled the meet-and-greet a “listening session” but I recall Msgr. Lucio Ruiz talking a lot before he opened the floor that day.

When he did open the discussion, I asked—roughly—whether there was a vision for responding to the communications crisis in the Vatican and the Church more broadly, how the leadership of the new Secretariat understood the way the comms crisis fit into the broader crisis in the Church, and when we would be made privy to that vision?

His response, as I recall it, was to reject the premise of the question: The Church is not in crisis.

That’s an old comms trick, the sort of thing aspiring flacks learn on Day One of their media training and a tactic veterans teach their green principals.

It was also patently false and frankly absurd, even in 2016, illustrative not only of the ostrichism that characterizes the upper echelons of power in the Church, but also—and perhaps primarily—an attitude of contempt for the faithful, especially though by no means exclusively for the laity.

I never doubted for a minute—not for a second—that the fellow believed every word of his denial.

In hindsight, I recognize that moment as the one in which I began to see I wasn’t working for the good guys.

I’ve compared the discovery to the one with which Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow ended the first season of the spy show Alias. Bristow thought she was working for a super-secret CIA division called SD-6. Really, she was working for a nefarious criminal outfit by the same name, set up and run by a fanatical devotee of a fifteenth-century renegade genius trained by monks and bent on remaking the world as he willed it.

That was a classic TV “reveal” that set up the drama of Season 2 in a silly spy show. My realization was rather gradual. It had begun long before and would take a while to come on fully.

I should say I’ve shared the tongue-in-cheek Alias comparison several times privately but only once before publicly, if memory serves, when I was honored to deliver the 2022 Cafone Lecture at Seton Hall University. These remarks draw on those I made that day but treat of different specifics. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in the past two years, so this is for me at once an exercise in thinking out loud and a measure of progress in thinking.

In any case, one important incongruity weakens the Alias comparison: SD-6 were the bad guys.

Most clerics are neither especially bad nor especially good. They’re people like the rest of us. Like the rest of us they are conditioned by their culture, hence by the institutions that create and sustain that culture.

That culture—clerical and general—is broken.

Constitutional crisis

The ongoing scandals of disgraced ex-Jesuit Fr. Marko I. Rupnik and Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò are amply illustrative of the rot found in clerical and hierarchical leadership culture. They are paradigmatic, not mere scandals but converging moments of a multifaceted and polyvalent crisis in the Church.

On June 20^th, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò—olim nuncio to the United States and erstwhile celebrity whistleblower of 2018-turned paranoid lunatic—let it be known that he had been brought up on charges of schism for denying Pope Francis’s legitimacy and rejecting communion with him and the worldwide college of bishops in communion with Rome.

The next day, Pope Francis’s Communicator-in-Chief, Dr. Paolo Ruffini, made it abundantly clear—explicitly, inescapably clear—in words, that the Vatican’s continued use of Rupnik’s abusive art is a matter of policy.

Viganò has his supporters—heaven only knows how—but a chorus of leading voices across the whole spectrum of opinion in the Church agreed Viganò had it coming.

There’s practically nobody—not even the most ardent Team Francis die-hards—defending Ruffini or the pope when it comes to the Vatican’s appalling policy of contempt for victims of abuse and coverup.

“I always appreciated [Viganò] as a great worker very faithful to the Holy See,” said the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, in comments regarding the sad case of Viganò. “In a certain sense [Vigano was] also an example,” Parolin also said. “When he was apostolic nuncio [to the United States] he worked extremely well,” Parolin said.

Just exactly how well Viganò really worked as nuncio to the US is a question, given he embarrassed his principal in 2015 and had more to do with keeping the McCarrick business under wraps than he ever let on in any of his spectacular J’accuse! letters from 2018. The editors and redactors of the McCarrick Report made sure we knew about that, though.

There were gaping holes in the Vatican’s version, but the folks who put it together appeared at pains to make sure Viganò came out showing at least as poorly as Francis than they were to clarify the whys and wherefores of McCarrick’s rise.

As John Allen noted in his regular Sunday column of June 23^rd, however, Parolin’s statement does take a good bit of heat off the many US bishops who expressed varying degrees of confidence in Viganò when he first blew the whistle in the sweltering August 2018, annus horribilis in the chronicles of the Church.

Basically, Viganò was never the paladin hero. As a whistleblower, I’m fond of saying, he was always more Joe Valachi than Frank Serpico. US bishops, however, knew Viganò as a competent nuncio. So, they said his allegations should get a careful vetting. They were right about that.

Whether one credits the Vatican’s assertion that the 2020 McCarrick Report “comprehensively vindicated” Pope Francis is beside the point. The willingness of some US bishops to entertain Viganò’s original set of allegations in 2018 can’t be turned into blanket support for his schismatic rants or his espousal of tinfoil hat conspiracy theories.

As Viganò’s public statements became more strident—they would become utterly unhinged, and in short order—some soi-disant papal defenders nevertheless tried to paint everyone who had ever expressed any willingness to take Viganò’s allegations seriously as likewise disloyal and deranged.

That was never really a plausible line, nor was it particularly helpful to Pope Francis. Parolin’s remark deserves to be the final nail for it.

In any case, Viganò made the job for Vatican prosecutors in the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith a great deal easier on Friday, June 28^th, when he issued a statement—this time literally titling it, J’Accuse—foreswearing communion with Pope Francis and accusing Pope Francis of schism and heresy, denying the legitimacy of the tribunal before which he was being tried, and calling for Pope Francis’s removal.

There was every reason to try Viganò in the open, but that’s not what happened.

The Vatican described the charges against Viganò in general terms—schism—but never said exactly which of Viganò’s many statements were actually criminal. That missed step was important. The law is a teacher, as the saying goes, and the application of the law to circumstance can only serve the law’s didactic purpose when it is public and explicit.

Then, justice is a public good.

Justice, another saying goes, must be seen to be done. Both the accused and the public, in whose name the organs of government exact justice deserve to know exactly what criminal wrongdoing there was. This is a basic requirement, one without which there is not even the semblance of justice.

The opacity of ecclesiastical processes has too often protected the guilty, while the secrecy under which those processes continue to be conducted harms the innocent.

The rationale for judicial secrecy is that it protects both accusers and the accused and safeguards the integrity of the judicial process. Experience teaches the implausibility of that rationale. Even if it were more generally plausible than it is, applying it to notorious cases is notoriously problematic.

Publicizing the results of a process without publishing the charges and without publicly conducting the process itself destroys the public trust. People who may be subjected to such travesties of justice have every reason to fear those who wield such power. They have no reason to trust that those who wield such power are interested in the substance of justice.

Tried secretly, a case like the one there was against Viganò encourages timidity in the public counsels. Trying such a case in secret encourages insalubrious elements. It lends credence to outlandish opinions. It has the effect, if not the intention, of terror.

The problem is nothing new in Rome.

The 19th-century polemicist, Edmond About, noted how Roman officials from the pope on down, “[S]ervants of a most merciful but sometimes severe God,” all, “simultaneously abuse both mercy and justice,” are, “full of indulgence for the indifferent, for their friends, and for themselves,” and, “treat with extreme rigor whoever has had the misfortune to become obnoxious to power.”

These considerations apply in spades to the Rupnik Affair, which never would have come to light were it not for the doggedness of journalists.

Remember that Rupnik is accused of spiritually, psychologically, and sexually abusing dozens and perhaps scores of victims—most of them women religious—over a thirty-year stretch of time, much of which he spent right under the noses of his erstwhile Jesuit superiors in Rome and during which he was fêted by popes beginning with St. John Paul II.

Roman and Jesuit authorities heard tell of Rupnik’s depraved conduct as early as the 1990s, but either winked at his behavior or actively sought to discredit his accusers. Rupnik was investigated multiple times between 2019 and 2023. He was secretly tried for absolving an “accomplice” in a sexual sin, but the secret excommunication imposed for that crime was secretly and very swiftly lifted. Eventually, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith—as it was then styled—decided there was a very strong case against Rupnik ruled the charges statute-barred and declined to prosecute.

I have discussed elsewhere and at length the reasons for which that decision was cause for consternation. Basically, statutes of limitations exist to protect the integrity of processes. They may be waived when the crime is severe and the rights of the accused to examine evidence and confront witnesses secure. In Rupnik’s case, there was a bumper crop of both evidence and living witnesses. CDF nevertheless decided to let it die on the vine.

The Jesuits expelled him for disobedience—not for serial rape—and Koper diocese in Rupnik’s native Slovenia picked him up. When news of that reached the public, it ignited worldwide outrage and brought even more intense public scrutiny, in the face of which Pope Francis decided to give Rupnik’s case to the DDF again for review. Francis sent the case to the DDF nine months ago, but about the only thing we’ve heard about it is that the business is a “delicate matter” though well in hand.

In any other society, a single such miscarriage of justice would trigger protest. Regular abuse of justice over decades and indeed centuries would produce sustained and increasingly raucous agitation demanding reform. The only reason such protests have been relatively few and such agitation episodic and piecemeal rather than sustained and concerted is the sheer size and articulation of the Church, but that is changing.

It will soon become impossible for churchmen to ignore the constitutional crisis in which we are joined.

The task of thinking

For Catholics who see the need to think through the current crisis in the Church, three things continue to make the business difficult.

The failure to distinguish power from the structural apparatus through which it is wielded, is one. Confusion—occasionally conflation—of current and long-standing modes of organizing and directing power with the governing power properly considered in itself, is another.

The tendency to mistake a clear though partial view of specific facets with a complete vision of the matter as a whole, is a third.

Consternating as the secret process Viganò received may be, confounding as candid minds must judge the Rupnik Affair from start to finish, each illustrates the workaday fraudulence of ecclesiastical justice.

What we need now is a reckoning with this appalling fact of our circumstances.

Power in the Church is too often unbalanced and poorly wielded. The organs and structures of power in the Church are incapable of governing the society for the good of which the power itself is given. That, however, is only part—no more than half—of the problem.

Measuring the extent of the rot, finding the source(s) of it, and studying its progress, are all needful.

They are nonetheless mere preliminaries. The real work of reform must address the organization and direction of power in the Church. The work of real reform will begin only when we come to grips with the fact of the Church’s power structure—hierarchical and divinely given if dogma is creditable—and squarely face the fact that the Church’s current modes and orders of power are untenable.

We must, in other words, together consider how to reform the modes and orders of ecclesiastical government in a way that does not run afoul of her divinely given hierarchical constitution. That begins with recognizing something the great Massachusetts lawyer and Founding Father, John Adams, saw very clearly, i.e., that the people have:

[The] right, from the frame of their nature, to knowledge, as their great Creator, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings, and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean, of the characters and conduct of their rulers.

I confess the quote a favorite, about which I have written before—in both secular and Catholic contexts—and spoken on occasion in connection with our current ecclesiastical situation. Adams offered his remark in his Dissertation on Canon and Feudal Law, which he wrote to demonstrate the superiority of the laws in British America with respect to those two systems. It is also noteworthy here, that Adams held the canon and feudal systems to contain the concrete threat of tyranny.

Leave aside for now the question of whether we have tyrannical rule in the Church. Let us agree that the Church is a power structure—at least that she has a divinely given hierarchical power structure—and where there is power, there is the constant threat of its abuse. Let us also agree that the faithful have a right to knowledge of the character and conduct of their rulers in the faith.

Let these be words for a conversation.

Catholic World Report