Sex Abuse and Episcopal and Papal Cover-Up: What to Do?

As a Canadian (as well, of course, as a man of heroic modesty and saintly humility) I am constitutionally averse to promoting my own work, but if there is any moment where it might be helpful to people, now is it. 

The McCarrick report came out of Rome this week. I have been interviewed about it already and asked to write about it. The first article came out this morning in the Catholic Herald. More will follow, there and likely elsewhere. 

The question I have already been asked by editors is this: what can be done about the catastrophically broken system of governance and episcopal appointment in the Church? 

My answers are the same as those I began giving more than a decade ago: the closed system of papal appointment and promotion must be destroyed. Not tinkered with, moderately reformed, mildly changed, slightly altered: destroyed. Blown up. Annihilated. Cremated, and its ashes fired out of a space cannon to the dark side of Saturn or Jupiter.  

That system, people must come to learn, is a total novelty anyway, scarcely a century old. The idea that it is some longstanding part of sacred and holy Tradition is a pernicious fantasy that must itself now die. Only with the 1917 code of canon law is the claim--the novel and wicked claim--made that the pope of Rome has the right to appoint all the world's bishops. That claim is so staggering, so modernist, so untraditional, so without theological justification, that the eminent historian Eamon Duffy has rightly called it a coup d'Eglise. 

What must also die is the even worse fantasy that the current system is somehow required by the claims of Vatican I (repeated verbatim at Vatican II) that "universal jurisdiction" of the pope of Rome requires him to appoint bishops universally. That is nonsense, and the easiest proof of that is the existence of the Eastern Catholic Churches, most of whose bishops are not in fact appointed by the pope but elected by their own synods. So the current system is neither required nor any longer defensible. Indeed, it is a millstone around the neck of the Church: either we kill it or it will continue to kill us all. 

What might or should replace it? Synodal election is the best system to my mind. I argued this out in some detail in my Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, published early last year. Have a look and let me know if you can think of a better way forward. 

A Note on Episcopal Elections

Whenever I argue, as I did here today, about episcopal elections in the Catholic Church, invariably someone reacts with horror at the prospect of sinful lay people participating. To which my response is always the same: find me an election, to any office however lowly, at any point anywhere in history in any ecclesial body on the planet that was not composed of and conducted by sinners.

Catholics are unused to the idea of episcopal election, but those in the Christian East (including Eastern Catholics) are not. I documented the different synodal-electoral structures and practices across the East in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, reviewing more than a dozen different models for the selection of bishops--some very centralized on the modern Roman model, and others very much involving lay people and parish clergy at the local level.

Is any one model perfect? Of course not. Has any one model a monopoly on producing saints for candidates? Don't be silly. I am well aware that local election by no means guarantees--as I said in the final paragraph of my essay--that we will not have "lunatics" (Adrian Fortescue's phrase). No system is perfect. The idea that papal appointment will always produce competent non-criminals, much less saints, is obviously false to anyone who has been paying attention. Each system has flaws, which is to be expected since they are all composed by and of human beings.

My overall point was a simple one: local election is the minimum necessary to convince the Orthodox of Catholic good faith and desire for full communion. I am, in other words, arguing this out on ecumenical-ecclesiological grounds, not because I'm a romantic populist of some sort.

For those who want to get into some of the historical details about episcopal elections, then let me recommend several works. Joseph O'Callaghan's book, Electing Our Bishops: How the Catholic Church Should Choose Its Leaders, is perhaps a good place to begin for the non-specialist. It is, as the title suggests, more of a plaidoyer than an historical monograph strictly recounting details.

For that, one must turn to Peter Norton's fascinating and invaluable Episcopal Elections 250-600: Hierarchy and Popular Will in Late Antiquity. He shows, inter alia, that "election" sometimes meant ham-fisted imperial appointment, sometimes meant little more than mobs dragging candidates to the altar, and sometimes meant something closer to the popular selection we moderns imagine by that term of  "election."

Norton's study is now just over a decade old. More recent works include the wide-ranging collection Episcopal Elections in Late Antiquity, eds. Johan Leemans,‎ Peter Van Nuffelen, and‎ Shawn W. J. Keough.

Finally, and more widely for those who want to consider the larger issue of synodality, in addition to my book noted above, I also commend to you the wide-ranging, multi-lingual collection Synod and Synodality: Theology, History, Canon Law and Ecumenism in New Contact, edited by Alberto Melloni and‎ Silvia Scatena.