Aim For the Face
Maybe metaphors aren’t that hard after all.
A full decade before the Spotlight reports came out, Chicago had its own citywide clergy sex abuse scandal; it’s the only time I’ve been disappointed that we beat Boston to something. This was in the fall of 1991, and the archbishop, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, had fucked everything up. He had reassigned priests he shouldn’t have reassigned, and he had ignored reports and allegations that he shouldn’t have ignored. It was a very bad time to be in the Catholic church in Chicago, and it was his fault.
Bernardin had an impossible job coming out of this: he had to set up some sort of process and some sort of structure to prevent a citywide abuse scandal from ever happening again, ten years before Spotlight, ten years before the Dallas Charter, with no blueprint or template for how to handle this. So he created an independent review board to investigate abuse allegations and make recommendations to the archbishop’s office on what needed to be done and who needed to be removed from ministry. The review board was one of the first ones that any American diocese had set up, and it’s still around today. Some of the reforms Bernardin put in place worked, and some of them didn’t, and there were still some things Bernardin fucked up, and there were still some things that the review board fucked up. It’s not an excuse to say “they had an impossible job and they were the first to do it so I’m not surprised things got fucked up”, but it’s true. Bernardin, in trying to put things back together for Chicago after a seismic crisis, had an impossible job. I don't know if I could have done anything differently, were I in his shoes.
Bernardin’s successor, Cardinal Francis George, did not have an impossible job. He actually had a pretty easy job when it came to handling abuse cases, because he had that independent review board in place, made up of experts that were going to handle the abuse cases for him. So in October 2005, that board recommended to George that he remove Father Daniel McCormack from ministry permanently, given that McCormack had been credibly reported multiple times for sexual abuse of children. George instead chose to do nothing, and to this day nobody's really clear on why he chose to do nothing. You’re not going to believe what happened next.
In January 2006, Daniel McCormack was arrested and eventually jailed on multiple counts of sexually abusing minors, and it came out that the arch of Chicago had actually received dozens of claims of child sexual abuse against McCormack during his career without removing him from ministry; today, the final count is 104. It was a very bad time to be in the Catholic church in Chicago, and it was George's fault. The review board had to hire a law firm to audit processes and figure out what went wrong:
“The auditors…found a “total breakdown in communication amongst the archdiocesan staff assigned to react to allegations of sexual abuse of minors.” The auditors also found that while the archdiocese had policies and procedures in place to respond to child sex abuse allegations, it did not comply with those policies, and did not follow the “basic spirit of their own established guidelines.” The audit further noted that archdiocesan staff “did not know or have forgotten what actions to take” when receiving a child sex abuse allegation. With respect to McCormack, the auditors identified failures in monitoring McCormack after his August 2005 arrest, which allowed him further access to children. The audit also identified the failure to investigate the 2003 allegation, admonishing the archdiocese for the excuse that the complainant wished to remain anonymous."
Bernardin had an impossible job with no blueprint. George had an easy job that came with the independent review board, plus the Dallas Charter, plus sex abuse scandals had been uncovered worldwide and the global church had all put reforms in place to prevent situations exactly like this. All of the work had been done for him and was written down; the 1991 scandal had shocked Chicagoans, but the church had said “we are going to put everything in place to regain your trust”, and those structures had told George exactly what the right thing was to do. But George was the only one with the actual power to take McCormack out of ministry, and he decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. If I were in Bernardin's shoes, I don't know what I could have done differently, but I know exactly what I could have done differently if I were in George's shoes: when the board that I put in charge of dealing with abusive priests, a board created specifically to prevent things from blowing up in my face, told me "this priest is abusive and you need to take him out of ministry, otherwise things could blow up in your face," I feel like I probably would have said "okay, I'd better do that so things don't blow up in my face". I like to think i would have gotten there, say, before victims 18 or 19 came forward. George didn't get there. He apparently didn't care if the whole thing blew up in his face. It's not like he was going to lose his job over this, and, of course, he didn't; he just kept being the archbishop for several more years until he retired.
Now, I’ve already written about what happened this year, but George’s successor, Blase Cupich, had a far easier job than Bernardin did, and he even had an easier job than George did. The Illinois Attorney General, in response to a wave of nationwide church abuse scandals in 2018, kicked off a five-year investigation into clerical sex abuse across the state; all Cupich had to do in order to come off as halfway competent was just make sure that he had published all of his records of every priest in Chicago that had been credibly accused of sexual abuse in the portal of publicly available abuse records which already existed and had been set up after the McCormack scandal blew up. Cupich said, at the start of the investigation, “no problem, all set, got it”, and five years later it turns out the number of abusive priests he had been sitting on without publicly reporting them (72) was higher than the number of priests that actually were publicly reported (68). And again, you can see the problem here: Cupich can’t claim ignorance. He was told what he had to do, sixteen years after everyone in the world knew what was going on and twenty-seven years after everyone in Chicago knew what was going on and twelve years after his predecessor had screwed up very publicly after also being well aware of what the correct course of action was, and he still didn’t do it, and when the final state report came out this summer, he complained that the AG was being too mean to him because he probably hated the Catholic church too much.
So the current archbishop fucked up. The previous archbishop fucked up. The archbishop before him fucked up. I don’t know who the next archbishop of Chicago will be, but the head of the Dicastery for Bishops, which will make recommendations to the Pope on who to install next, is the new Cardinal Robert Prevost, and prepare to be shocked, but he also has a history of fucking up sex abuse allegations in Chicago. As we learned earlier this year from the hardest-working paper in America, Prevost, as provincial head of the Augustinians in Chicago in 2000, let a priest who had been credibly accused of child sex abuse and removed from ministry nine years earlier move into his friary, which is not a huge concern by itself, except the friary is next door to a Catholic grade school, and Prevost didn’t think the Catholic school needed to be notified, and also the paperwork authorizing the move said "yeah guys don't worry he's an abuser but it’s not like there are any schools nearby" when the nearest grade school was, again, right next door and the church had said “we’re going to stop letting abusive priests near kids,” again, in 1991. So I’m not convinced that Prevost will effectively prioritize abuse prevention when he reviews candidates for my next archbishop.
There’s been plenty of writing and reflection, from me and also people who are actually professional writers, on how the abuse crisis has shaken our faith, made us angry at the church we grew up in, made us resistant to keep receiving the sacraments or teach our children that being part of this church was good and worth passing on. But today I’d like to talk about a very concrete and immediate concern: I have two kids who go to school in the arch of Chicago. I sure would like to be confident that a sexual abuser would never be posted to my children’s school. I sure would like to be confident that if anyone had to report any misconduct, the report would be taken seriously. I sure would like to be confident that the people who run the arch would always prioritize the safety of my children over the reputation of the church. My parents also worried about this when they sent their children to Catholic schools, and I think they were hoping that this would not be a concern by the time their grandchildren started going to Catholic schools. But that’s where we are. So today’s question is not “how do we rebuild trust and faith across the church after the abuse crisis?”, although that is an important question. Today’s question is not “how does the church restore the world’s trust after the abuse crisis, so we can help the world address its urgent problems?”, although that is also an important question.
Today’s question is “since we are very much still in the abuse crisis, how do we not be in the abuse crisis anymore, because we would really like to be in a church where people aren’t getting abused?” Another way to ask this question is “when abusers actually got removed from ministry, what did it take, and how do we expand that?” And there were two stories from October that helped me think about a potential answer.
The first story was a two-parter by Sara Scarlett Wilson at Where Peter Is that was - and I mean this as a compliment - pretty infuriating. It’s about a former parish priest in the diocese of Reno named Patrick Klekas, who was recently removed from ministry because he had been grooming, pressuring, and sexually assaulting married women in his pastoral care. This is not sexual abuse of minors, of course, but the thing about sexually abusing adults is that it is, as it turns out, also a crime, and also a disqualifying crime when it comes to the priesthood.
Wilson’s is not a fun story to read, and part two is especially illustrative for the point I’m trying to make, because it follows a woman on the receiving end of Klekas’ abuse using all of the processes and tools set up to report abuse and prevent Klekas from harming anyone else, and this woman just gets nowhere with any of it. She reports Klekas to his bishop. Then she reports him to his archbishop. Even though, as it later became clear, bishop Daniel Mueggenborg knew as far back as Klekas’ seminary days that this guy was never fit to serve as a priest, even though the woman at the center of the story followed the process the way she was supposed to, even though she had a staggering amount of evidence of Klekas’ behavior including text messages and door cam footage, even though another woman came forward as well with similar accusations and evidence, Klekas was still returned to active ministry and official statements from the diocese of Reno said things to the effect of "we think these horny broads are lying".
So then, in summer 2023, the women went to a journalist. And they filed a police report. And reporters, including Wilson, started contacting the diocese asking for comments on what the hell was going on. And wouldn’t you know it, the bishop who said he wasn’t going to do anything, who said the evidence wasn’t enough, who said that Klekas was ready to return to ministry, changed his tune immediately and revoked all of Klekas’ faculties “after considering additional facts and information and the further recommendations of the Adult Misconduct Review Board”. The second people got angry and started asking questions of the bishop directly, things changed.
The process was in place to prevent something like this from ever happening again. When it happened again, the women turned to the process, and the process failed. And then they got angry, and they found a way to make the people in power feel threatened, and the pace of change picked up significantly. Let’s see if we can take those lessons a little further up the hierarchy.
At the beginning of the Synod this past month, Pope Francis urged the participants to “fast” from talking to the media during the four weeks of Synod sessions; surprisingly, almost all of the participants actually listened to him, and there were very few leaks or firsthand media reports of the Synod's goings-on. Pope Francis, perhaps understandably, didn’t want the media to derail the narrative of the Synod or focus it unnecessarily on one or two hot button issues. In retrospect, this appears to be because Pope Francis wanted to derail the narrative himself, because we had the goddamn Rupnik scandal blow up in the last days of the damn thing.
I already wrote a short piece on Rupnik, which you’re welcome to read for my important “furious Catholic who also took two comedy sketch writing classes in 2012” perspective. One of the more comprehensive timelines of all of the parts and pieces of the scandal and related reporting is over at Mike Lewis’ personal website, but in short: Rupnik was a Jesuit priest who is also pretty famous in the church because he’s an accomplished artist, and it turns out that about two dozen women have accused him of sexually abusing them. The Jesuits found those allegations credible, so they started the process to investigate things and keep this case from blowing up in their faces. Rupnik refused to cooperate with the investigation, so the Jesuits kicked Rupnik out. But Rupnik got welcomed and re-installed as a diocesan priest in his native Slovenia, which was appalling to Rupnik’s victims, and to the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, and to anyone who thought we had processes in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening, and to anyone who paid attention to the case over the past year and noticed that Pope Francis had actually intervened in the investigation, met publicly with some of Rupnik’s main defenders, and declined to waive the statute of limitations to open up the investigation further. In short, Pope Francis could have ended this extremely high-profile scandal months ago, and didn’t, and by letting things ride, indirectly allowed Rupnik to just keep being a priest in good standing even though he had likely assaulted dozens of people and had briefly been excommunicated for abusing the sacraments.
So journalists poked at this story, and when they found out that Rupnik was still working as a priest, the media - both Catholic and secular - started highlighting how absurd this was, and Catholics who had just been told that we needed to trust the process of Our New Listening Church got furious that this was allowed to happen. Journalists started asking very pointed questions directly to people at the Vatican, and Pope Francis was forced to act so that people wouldn’t be furious at him anymore, and he re-opened the investigation and waived the statute of limitations.
Two cases where abusive priests were returned to ministry, and both returns have happened in the past six months. Two instances where we had decades-old processes in place, established in the wake of widespread horrifying scandals. Two processes that still didn’t work because the people at the top decided that they didn’t have to work. And two rapid changes of tune the second that reporters and pissed off Catholics started making noise, and directing that noise at specific targets.
Now, this isn’t a love letter to Catholic media. I mostly don’t like Catholic media; with very few exceptions, they have no sense of humor, no sense of memory, and no good way to analyze material power (and of course that’s what keeps all of you kind and attractive readers coming back to G.O.T.H.S.). But they do occasionally come through for us on issues like this. Bishops, who are still the only real arbiters of how abuse gets investigated and how consequences get dealt out in the church, do not come through for us and do not act even when the process gets followed, the process they created to deal with this crisis in the first place. And while bishops don’t act when the process gets followed, they do act when they feel threatened: specifically, threatened in the sense that their power could be taken away, that they could lose their jobs, that their fancy prestigious role as a direct descendant of the Apostles could suddenly become a living hell for the rest of their careers. Media, both Catholic and secular, has an important role to play in that. Lay Catholics, especially if they can get organized and coordinate how they apply pressure to prelates, have a role to play in that too, to treat the bishops not as leaders deserving of deference, but idiots who need to be pressured, constantly, into acting right. Sober theological reflection is not getting it done. New structures that make it as easy as possible for the bishops to act the right way at not getting it done, either. Meaningful criticism of power, criticism that applies pressure and gets personal, is what we need. These aren't bishops from a bygone era who mishandled cases from a bygone era. Priests are still committing acts of abuse. The highest levels of the church hierarchy are still working to keep them active as priests. The crisis is still happening, people are failing to take the steps that we made easy and obvious and the bare minimum, and our church's current leadership deserves to be tarred with it.
The other reason that this isn’t a love letter to Catholic media is because I’m about to make fun of John Allen again.
At the beginning of the Synod, I made fun of Crux writer John L. Allen, Jr. for using a terrible metaphor comparing the Synod to the Super Bowl. I don’t know a lot about Allen or Crux, but I’ve picked up another data point that is very quickly bringing me around to the opinion that he’s a bad writer. It’s his October 29th piece titled “Fallout from the Pope’s ‘October Surprise’ on the Rupnik case”:
“Back in 1980, William Casey, then the campaign manager for candidate Ronald Reagan, coined the phrase “October surprise” to refer to the possibility that incumbent President Jimmy Carter might try to do something dramatic, such as freeing the American hostages in Iran, to boost his prospects ahead of the November elections. In the end it never happened, and Reagan cruised to victory. Ever since, however, the term “October surprise” has endured in American politics as a metaphor for trying to change the political landscape with some sort of bombshell at the last minute. On Friday, Pope Francis delivered his own “October surprise” by announcing that he had lifted the statute of limitations in canon law in order to allow prosecution of Father Marko Rupnik, the most famous – or, perhaps more accurately, the most infamous – accused sexual abuser in the Catholic Church at the moment…Francis injected his Oct. 4-29 Synod of Bishops on Synodality with at least a degree of relevance it otherwise appeared to lack…Granted, critics will say this decision should have come much earlier, and that if the pope is genuinely interested in listening, he already should have met Rupnik’s accusers and not just one of his principal apologists. If he really needed a month-long summit to reach those conclusions, cynics might say, things are even worse than we suspected. Nonetheless, for those inclined to find a silver lining in the synodal experience, the belated concession on Rupnik is at least something.”
Not only is this a terrible use of metaphor - this didn’t happen before an election, and also “October Surprise” has more recently referred to exogenous non-campaign events affecting an election like an FBI investigation or an extremely funny hospitalization for COVID - but it has me questioning whether Allen understands the basic concept of cause and effect. Pope Francis wasn’t sitting with his Synod small group in the Paul VI Hall when he was suddenly moved to think “wait a second, have I done anything about Rupnik?” The Synod had nothing to do with these new actions from the Pope, who didn’t take any steps to fix things until journalists started poking at the story, until his own commission started complaining, until it became clear that people were not going to let this go, until it became clear that his name was getting attached to this scandal permanently. Five years after McCarrick. Five years after Barros. Five years after the PA grand jury report. Twenty-two years after Boston. Thirty-two years after Chicago the first time, seventeen years after Chicago the second time, the same year as Chicago the third time.
Prevost and Cupich, two guys that I mentioned at the top of this piece, were both at that Synod with Pope Francis. In a press conference during the Synod, Prevost actually got a question about whether the Synod was putting abuse prevention at the center of its discussions. Prevost said he was going to answer the question “harshly”, and then went with this:
“The synod is a Synod on Synodality, and the primary energies, time, and topics were all related to, “How do we promote a synodal Church?” Protection of minors was discussed at some tables I understand — more than at others, perhaps. It was an issue in the sense of saying, “What are some of the problems that may arise and how can we better address them?” But that was not meant to be the central topic of the synod. And so I’m not prepared to say that became the focus of the synod because that was not the synod’s purpose. It’s an ongoing topic obviously in many countries around the world, many parts of the Church, and it will have to continue to be that. But I think it’s important also that it be kept in a proper perspective, because the whole life of the Church does not revolve around that specific issue as important as it is.”
Prevost - a man who once thought it was fine to house a credibly accused pedophile next door to a grade school nine years after everyone had decided the church shouldn’t be doing that sort of thing, and apparently considers that “proper perspective” - does not give me a lot of confidence that the Synod is going to give us new and more effective ways to prevent sexual abuse. Look, I wish I had a less cynical view of power, I really do. But I also wish that Pope Francis had maybe learned enough by 2023 so that when the worst abuse scandal in the past five years popped up, he did more than brush it off, and I wish that he would have acted before the press had forced him to do so. While I’m at it, I also wish that my current archbishop hadn’t been sitting on old records of seventy-two accused sexual abusers here in Chicago. I wish that he had learned something from his predecessor about that, but I also wish that his predecessor had listened to his lay advisory board in 2005 and not returned a priest to ministry who had abused over one hundred children. And I wish that particular bishop had learned something from his predecessor when he got caught reassigning abusive priests in 1991. But the people in power refuse to learn anything, refuse to use the tools we created so that this sort of thing would never happen again. So they have to be forced to act. We have to force them.
Maybe Pope Francis had some brilliant and subtle theological insight during the Synod, but here’s a non-brilliant, pretty obvious insight that any layperson could pick up from reading any previous G.O.T.H.S. essay: good theology doesn’t do much in the face of bad power. So if you want really good theology, it had better include some understanding of how power works and how to act in response to it. And I’m not saying this for some vague “because it will give us a better church that can better carry out its mission in the world” reason, even though that’s not a bad reason. I’m saying it because Catholics are still being sexually abused, and the abusers are still being sheltered, and the church can promise new reforms and new structures to fix it and tell me that the Synod is really going to change how things get done, but I've seen every new reform and new structure for the past three decades and they're not enough. Since we are very much still in the abuse crisis, how do we not be in the abuse crisis anymore, so that we can be in a church where people aren’t getting abused? Put another way: when abusers actually were removed from ministry, what did it take to get them out? It took Catholics getting angry, in a way that made powerful people feel threatened, feel like they were at risk of losing their power, feel like they were becoming the center of attention in a very bad way.
So back to John Allen: come on with this “October surprise” shit. You’ve been screwing up metaphors left and right here during the Synod, and despite what I’ve said in previous essays, metaphors are actually pretty easy. Look, I’ll show you.
In August of 2018, when the PA grand jury report came out, Notre Dame historian Kathleen Sprows Cummings, about whose work I’ve written recently, wrote an op ed in the New York Times that led off with a very evocative metaphor:
“I often use a handy metaphor to explain to my students how feminists have historically differed among themselves in their approaches to bringing about change in patriarchal institutions. Some feminists seek a place at the table; others want to reset the table. The former hope to promote gradual progress from within an existing framework of norms and organizational structures; the latter demand nothing less than radical, wholesale reform. When it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, I have always been a “place at the table” kind of feminist. When asked how to integrate women more fully into the life of the church, I offer reasonable strategies. Bishops could, for example, recognize that the call for leadership might flow as much from the sacrament of baptism as from that of ordination, and appoint more women to leadership positions at all levels of church governance. Tuesday’s grand jury report about clerical sexual abuse in Pennsylvania has changed my mind. The sickening revelations — over 1,000 victims, more than 300 priests, 70 years of cover-ups — have propelled me directly to the center of the “reset the table” camp. We need to rip off the tablecloth, hurl the china against a wall and replace the crystal with something less ostentatious, more resilient and, for the love of God, safer for children.”
There’s a good metaphor for the abuse crisis: for a relatively short time, the bishops have been reluctantly letting us sit with them at the dinner party. But that’s not enough to fix things; we know from decades of ignored advisory councils and delayed records releases that we cannot rely on the bishops having responsible table manners here. What works is pressure, what works is discomfort, what works is standing up and throwing the china. The only thing I would change in Cummings’ metaphor is that we should be aiming the plates right at their faces.