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Pope Francis’ new system for assessing allegations of sexual abuse or cover-up against individual Catholic bishops, which went into effect in June 2019, is admirable. For the first time in millennia – literally – an active process is in place to hold prelates accountable if they fail in their duty to protect children or vulnerable adults from clerical predators.
But after two years, it is clear that the process – which involves the Vatican allowing archbishops to conduct the necessary investigations in their local areas according to papacy standards motu propio letter Your Estis Lux Mundi – requires significant improvement.
First on the role should be a substantial increase in transparency about which bishops are being investigated, what the charges involved involve and who exactly is investigating.
Second place is something that, three decades after the onset of the continuing crisis of church abuse, many would reasonably have thought the Vatican should have understood by now: lay experts must be involved in all investigations.
Bishop Steven Biegler of Cheyenne, Wyoming, has had close experience with both issues. Shortly after being appointed head of his diocese in 2017, Biegler reopened an investigation into allegations of abuse against one of his predecessors, Joseph Hart.
As correspondent Christopher White reports, Biegler’s investigation, led by an experienced abuse lawyer, found the allegations against Hart “credible and valid.” But after Biegler passed the issue on to Rome, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith determined, without the help of outside experts, that the allegations against Hart could not be proven.
Perhaps the Vatican clergymen who reviewed the case knew better than the lawyer, and better than the Cheyenne Diocesan Review Board, which had also reviewed the allegations against Hart. You can color us skeptical.
While the standards of Your Estis Consider that the prelates can ask lay experts to participate in the investigations against the bishops, they do not mandate it, neither at the local level nor in the Vatican. This is a serious omission. Given the mistrust the church has gained over these decades, many will rightly never trust a process that does not, by default, involve lay experts.
Bishop Richard Stika of Knoxville, Tennessee, has an entirely different – but also instructive – experience of the new process of inquiry for prelates. In April, the Catholic blog reached The Pillar claims Stika is probably subjected to a Your Estis investigation, allegedly to find out whether Stika had properly investigated the charges against one of the seminarians in his diocese.
The blog’s news source? An anonymous “senior official of the Vatican Curia close to the Congregation for Bishops”. Beyond the failure of basic ethical standards of “Journalism 101” for researching news articles, the incident reveals how the Vatican’s persistent lack of transparency on bishops’ investigations is ultimately self-defeating.
In the two years of activity of Francis’ New Process, there has been exactly no announcement from the Vatican about which bishops are under investigation. Thanks to certain revelations from local dioceses and to the work of journalists (blog articles not sourced at reduced prices), we are aware of at least six investigations. But none were properly announced, and status updates are rare.
This lack of openness is probably due to the code of canon law strict provisions for the protection of the reputation of peoples against illegitimate attacks. And the Vatican may reasonably not wish to comment on the investigations until they have passed their initial stages, with some understanding of the facts at hand.
But, in layman’s terms, God’s people are to be warned when one of his shepherds is on the dock for possibly abusing or covering up the abuse of children. And, paradoxically, the lack of transparency about ongoing investigations into individual bishops is damaging the reputation of all prelates. Right now, any website can claim that a bishop is under investigation, even without proof. Who can say he is wrong?
Your Estis was promulgated by François two years ago on a ad experimentum, three-year basis. As Mercy Sr. Sharon Euart, a renowned canon lawyer, put it, “The document is valuable, but… it needs to be changed.
Two immediate changes should be obvious: to make the participation of lay experts compulsory and to increase transparency.
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