Bishops Confront Pressure to Give More Power to Laity

For six months, apologetic Roman Catholic bishops have been describing the church’s sexual abuse crisis in near-apocalyptic terms as “a time of purification.”

Now, as the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops prepares to convene Thursday in Dallas for the first time since the scandal erupted, the bishops face a day of judgment.

The immediate decision before them is whether to approve an unprecedented policy that would cast a cleric out of the priesthood forever if he sexually abused minors, with a narrow but highly controversial exception for a one-time past offense.

Yet far more is at stake. The sex scandal is not simply about sex, but a more fundamental issue: control. A growing number of Catholic scholars and lay members are concluding that the scandal happened because of a lack of rank-and-file participation in the church. They are suggesting that the church’s all-powerful bishops and priests share authority with the laity, as is the case in many other Christian denominations. Ideas such as letting parish members make decisions on how contributions are spent and how priests are hired are spreading.

This kind of accountability will be the real subtext at the Dallas meeting, which will draw nearly 300 bishops from the 194 American dioceses.

There are efforts underway for victims of priestly abuse to address the bishops. But by and large, the bishops are expected to limit their debate to the immediate issue of sexual abuse policy.

Outside the Dallas Fairmont Hotel, however, the conference might more closely resemble the convention of a troubled political party searching for its soul.

A large number of Catholic and victims-rights organizations, picket signs in hand, see the conference as a rare chance for visibility. They include liberals who want to see married and women priests, conservatives who want to purge the priesthood of homosexuals and activists who demand a church that is far more participatory. The bishops conference has issued about 700 press credentials--a sharp increase from the 100 or so usually handed out to reporters who attend the twice-a-year gatherings.

Many say the sexual abuse scandal has awakened rank-and-file Catholics not only to the moral double standard of some bishops, but to the laity’s own powerlessness to effect change. That combination puts tremendous pressure on bishops to act decisively.

“It is the bishops who have scandalized the church,” said M. Therese Lysaught, an expert in theological ethics and associate professor of religious studies at the University of Dayton, a Catholic institution in Ohio. “Laypeople and the U.S. public have known for 20 years that priests have abused minors. It was not until the role of the bishops was revealed that people became morally outraged.”

Since January, almost every week has brought new allegations of priests having sexually abused minors, along with more troubling reports that some bishops allowed them to minister and molest after they were informed of the problem. At least 225 of the nation’s 46,000 Catholic priests have either quit or been forced to resign following recent allegations that they sexually abused children. Some bishops have admitted that in years past they, too, molested minors.

The scandal has angered and embarrassed Catholic laypeople as well as the vast majority of good priests, and led Pope John Paul II in April to summon U.S. cardinals to Rome for an extraordinary conference on the crisis.

Bishops are poised to enact the toughest policy against sexual abuse since they first took up the issue at a closed meeting in 1985. Since then, there have been additional steps, all of them incremental--ranging from a public acknowledgment of the problem in 1988 to winning Vatican approval in 1994 for extending the church’s own statute of limitations for bringing charges against abusive priests.

The flare-up of the scandal again this year forced bishops to respond with uncharacteristic speed. Last week, their ad hoc sexual abuse committee unveiled a compact that calls for safeguards that would far eclipse anything the American church has ever attempted.

The key proposal: If a priest were to commit even one act of sexual abuse of a minor in the future, his bishop would move to defrock him. The final decision in this process, known as “laicization,” would be up to the Vatican.

But in a move certain to provoke debate, the committee created a narrow exception to this so-called “zero-tolerance” policy, intended to cover “good” priests with a lone flaw in their past: If a priest committed only a single act of sexual abuse against a single child before the new rules took effect, and had undergone psychological treatment that determined he was not a pedophile, he could minister again.

This priest would have to be assigned to a ministry that did not involve minors, and would need a favorable recommendation from a lay-dominated sexual abuse review committee in his diocese. The committee would have to hear testimony from both the priest and his victim. Finally, if the priest were granted a new ministry, those to whom he ministered would be fully informed of his record in advance.

The proposals before the bishops this week include creating a national Office of Child and Youth Protection, headquartered in Washington, D.C., to assist the dioceses in creating or improving sexual abuse prevention policies. The new office would issue annual public reports tracking bishops’ compliance with the standards.

Bishops are expected to overwhelmingly approve the new proposal, although final details await amendments and floor debate before the showdown vote.

There have been mixed signals from Rome about whether the Vatican will approve any changes in canon law to put some of the reforms into effect. Some influential figures in Rome have called the American approach too harsh. Given the depth of public outrage, however, the exception to the “zero-tolerance” proposal--some disparage it as “two strikes and you’re out”--might not survive a floor vote.

Some bishops who have given a molesting priest another chance after psychological treatment have lived to rue the day--among them Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles.

Mahony, like Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston and other bishops, has come under severe criticism for transferring priests in past years to new assignments after being informed that they had sexually abused minors. Embarrassed by adverse publicity as well as millions of dollars in settlements, Mahony said he has drafted amendments to the ad hoc committee’s proposal that would strike down any exception.

“Too many dioceses have come to learn later on that there is no guarantee that a cleric has ‘successfully undergone treatment’ for the abuse of minors,” Mahony’s proposed amendment states. “No one can guarantee that there has been only one act of the sexual abuse of a minor. There is recidivism among clerics who have abused minors, and the church cannot risk its children and young people to such a possibility.”

As a practical matter, there may be very few priests who have committed only a single act of sexual abuse, Father Tom Reese, editor of the Jesuit magazine America said in an interview. But media exposure, lawsuits and pressure from outraged parishioners have created a symbolic importance easily grasped by bishops, who at times must be as much politico as pastor.

“If the bishops don’t handle this moment very well, they’re going to find an increasingly vociferous demand for wider involvement [by the laity],” said Paul Lakeland, a professor of religious studies at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution in Connecticut, who is an expert on the role of the laity. “What’s become apparent is, the structure is in some serious ways dysfunctional.”

Part of the outrage, said Dayton professor Lysaught, “comes from what is perceived to be a double standard. There is a sense among laypeople that if you commit certain kinds of sin you can be effectively excommunicated. Now we find there have been priests engaging in sins of much greater gravity who were protected, who weren’t excommunicated, who kept their jobs--and were allowed to celebrate the Eucharist!”

Father Peter Phan, president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, said it is time for bishops to grapple with how to empower the laity--for example, by transforming parish councils into “venues for true lay influence and decision-making.” Among their interests, he said, is parish financial spending priorities.

On Monday, 14 unofficial Catholic reform groups, at least half of them backers of women’s issues, announced that during the conference they will demand far greater lay involvement in the church.

“It’s our children, our faith and our resources that are at stake,” they said in a joint statement.

Signatories include Catholics for a Free Choice; Celibacy Is the Issue; Women’s Ordination Conference; Dignity/USA, a gay and lesbian group; and CORPUS, the National Assn. for an Inclusive Priesthood.

In reacting to such demands, the bishops are following a practice steeped in the history of governance: When radical change threatens, widen the power base. A number of the bishops have already placed lay members in the majority on their local sexual abuse advisory committees. And the draft compact pays brief homage to the laity by saying: “We do wish to affirm our concern especially with regard to issues related to effective consultation of the laity and the participation of God’s people in decision-making that affects their well-being.”

Some observers suggest the resignation of bishops who mishandled the crisis by protecting errant priests. Lysaught said such bishops should declare, “I was shepherd and I let the wolf into the sheepfold and I didn’t do anything about it.”

That kind of reaction flows predictably from veteran church watchers. The real evidence of grass-roots ferment is found in the heartfelt observations of everyday Catholics like Fran Ruth.

“I really love the church,” said Ruth, a graduate student at the Jesuit-owned Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.

As she searches for a resolution to the church’s wounds, she offers this suggestion: All Catholics would write down their grievances on slips of paper and place them in a bowl, where they would be burned. The ashes would be imposed on the foreheads of the faithful--and the bishops--on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Christian penitential season of Lent.

“What I want [the bishops] to truly do is to recognize they are responsible, just as responsible as the perpetrators, for all of what’s going on in this scandal,” Ruth said. “This is a pivotal point in church history. It’s time to open the doors to all the baptized--meaning the laypeople. We’re all ‘priests,’ and we should be seen as equal, regardless of sex or marital status.”