“Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel Ethics

ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel Ethics and Public Policy Center John L. Allen, Jr. National Catholic Reporter November 2010 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Welcome. George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow and a colleague of mine at Ethics and Public Policy Center. He’s written a definitive book on Pope John Paul II, but now he’s got a new book out called The End and the Beginning: John Paul II — The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy. George, we’re delighted to have you. GEORGE WEIGEL: Thank you, Mike, and good morning, everyone. My role today is to raise questions about the way in which sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy was and is covered and to suggest some possible new angles of exploration for the future. This is, of course, a complicated story. Eight years ago in this little book during the Long Lent of 2002, I insisted that “it was a serious mistake for some Catholic leaders and some Catholic traditionalists to argue that the crisis of sexual abuse was created by a media frenzy. It was not. The crisis was and is,” I wrote, “the Church’s crisis.” Moreover, the Church owed the press a debt of gratitude for “forcing to the surface issues that have for far too long been ignored or downplayed by the Church’s American leadership.” I meant that then and I would mean it now with reference to eight years ago. To be sure that praise in 2002 was not unqualified, some things were gotten wrong. Other things were misinterpreted or skewed. There was perhaps most significantly little or no attempt to locate the problem of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, which involved a very small percentage of priests in the broader cultural context of an epic of sexual abuse of the young, which takes place primarily in families and in which there were far higher ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr. November 2010 incidences of abuse in certain professional groups, like public school teachers, whose crimes went virtually unexamined. However, it would be difficult to say that in quite so unambiguous a way about Scandal Time II, as some of us came to call this past spring. But rather than go through a point by point identification of what seemed to me to be specific errors in reporting or specific errors of demonstrable editorial bias, I would rather look forward. The difference, it seems to me, between Scandal Time I in 2002 and Scandal Time II in 2010 is explained in part by a set of assumptions that skewed the most recent reporting and analysis sometimes rather badly. Left in place, these assumptions will continue to distort coverage of the Catholic Church across the full spectrum of questions in which the Church is engaged, and that would be bad for both journalism and for the Church. So in good biblical style, let me identify here telegraphically seven problematic assumptions that seem to me to be at work not all the time, but certainly more than once in this latest round of coverage and commentary earlier this year. The first of these is the assumption of the omnicompetence of the papacy or the notion that the Pope is an absolute monarch such that if anything goes wrong in the Catholic Church, the Pope is ultimately responsible. This is not true in either theory or in practice. During the third period of the Second Vatican Council, when the Council Fathers were completing work on the theological centerpiece of Vatican II’s work, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Paul VI proposed that a sentence be inserted in the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church that would read, “The Pope is answerable to the Lord alone,” or, “The Pope is responsible to the Lord alone.” That papal suggestion was rather sharply rejected by the Council’s Theological Commission which said that the Pope is responsible to any number of things which constrain his ability or capacity to do whatever he might wish to do. He’s constrained by the tradition of the Church. He’s constrained by the sacramental system of the Church. He’s constrained by the rules of logic. He is constrained by the canon law that governs his office, and so forth and so on. So that suggestion by Paul VI did not make it into 2 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr. November 2010 the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. The Pope, in other words, is the servant of an authoritative tradition. He is not the tradition’s master. This notion of papal omnicompetence is also not true in practice for no matter how competent, insightful, prophetic in the real sense of the term, ability to see things that others don’t see, a given pope may be, his exercise of the office of Peter is circumscribed by any number of human realities. The first of these, of course, is the competence of his subordinates. A Pope may have a genuinely prophetic capacity to see around corners and look through walls, but the competence of those subordinates nonetheless circumscribes what the Pope can do. The Pope’s ability to affect the life of the Church is also shaped considerably by the prerogatives of local bishops. It’s quite striking that as the Catholic Church has tried to move away in its own theology and self-understanding from the notion that bishops are simply local branch managers of RC, Inc., and the Catholic Church, you know, the CEO is in Rome, many of us have hung onto that notion that bishops are essentially branch managers or, if you like, platoon leaders in the Marine Corps who, when the Commandant says X, everybody staples a salute to their forehead and proceeds to do what they’re told. This is not the case as, of course, many of you did report this year. The Pope’s practical capacity to affect the life of the Church is also shaped by his own shrewdness in judging people and in making appointments, and of course, this connects to the first two points, the point about the competence of subordinates and the prerogatives of local bishops. One of the most interesting dynamics of the present pontificate where you have an indisputably world class theological mind operating in the office of Peter, and yet real questions can be raised about Pope Benedict’s shrewdness in the appointment of subordinates, as well as about John Paul II. So this assumption that the Pope is a kind of absolute monarch or Marine Commandant is problematic in itself. It’s also particularly problematic, it seems to me, because it tended this past spring to deflect attention from where attention needs to be paid, and that is to the functioning of local bishops who in, I would say, the overwhelming majority of cases that have come to the light of public attention since 2002 are where the source of the 3 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L. Allen, Jr. November 2010 genuine problem, the problem of malfeasance, misfeasance, incompetence, et cetera, lies. The second assumption that seems to be at work and needs to be cleared out is the assumption that the higher altitudes of the Roman Curia are led by men of world class competence, including the assumption, the sub-assumption within Assumption No. 2, if you will, that the Vatican runs what’s often called “the world’s best intelligence service” through its Nunciature system. This is simply not true. The quality of heads of decasteries in the Roman Curia over the past 20, 30, 40 years that I’ve been paying any attention to this does not seem to me necessarily higher than in other countries to which I pay attention or other systems in which I pay attention, like the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom, and in some notable instances that competence is quite lower. As for the information flow, this notion of the great intelligence service, I can tell you from personal experience that John Paul II was literally four months behind the curve of information in the period January to April 2002 because of grossly inadequate reporting from the apostolic nunciature, the Vatican Embassy in Washington, D.C. We were in the middle of April. He was in early January. This sounds incredible. I assure you it is true. So throughout all that year, while there was some closing of the gap, there was a serious, serious disengagement between what was happening on the ground in America and the structure of understanding of what was happening there that prevailed not only in the Roman Curia, but in the papal apartment. These two false assumptions that these guys really know what they’re doing and that they have a fantastic flow of information often lead to a further problematic assumption, namely, they must have a crisis management strategy, which then leads to a determination, sometimes bordering on an obsession to try to figure that out. But there wasn’t any crisis management strategy in 2010, as there wasn’t in 2002. It’s also wrong to assume that the senior officials of the Roman Curia, say the 20 people at the most who have real weight and real decision making capacity in issues like the ones we’re discussing, live in the same 24-7 communications universe we do. They don’t, and 4 ABRIDGED TRANSCRIPT “Sex Abuse, the Catholic Church, & the Media” George Weigel and John L.

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