Seeking a better way. (The public square: a continuing survey of religion and public life).(United States Catholic Bishops handling of priest sexual misconduct)

We may not have seen anything quite like this since Europe in the eighteenth century. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there is the by now familiar circumstance where a bishop is charged with mishandling the case of a priest charged with the sexual abuse of minors some ten years ago. The bishop is said to have sent him away for treatment, was assured by experts that he was no longer a danger to minors, and appointed him pastor of a parish. The earlier allegations were not reported to civil authorities. Governor Frank Keating of Oklahoma immediately declared himself outraged, saying this is precisely the kind of episcopal misbehavior that the Dallas meeting of bishops last June promised to stop. As governor, Keating is the chief law enforcement officer of the state. As head of the national review board authorized by Dallas, Keating is the chief enforcement officer of the bishops' "zero tolerance" policy. With respect to episcopal misconduct, Frank Keating is in the curious position of being the chief executive officer of both Church and state. That's the kind of thing we have not seen for a very long time,

In Austria it was called Josephinism, after Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, who, under Enlightenment influence more radical than Gallicanism in France, basically took over the Church in order to correct abuses. The policy in Austria lasted until 1850. For two centuries, and throughout a large part of Europe, the Catholic Church engaged in a turbulent, and finally successful, struggle to secure its freedom to govern itself. That great victory was won under the banner of libertas ecclesiae. America is not Europe, and Frank Keating is not Joseph II. Observers with a sense of history and some grasp of the department of theology called ecclesiology, however, may discern interesting similarities.

The embarrassing pusillanimity of the bishops in Dallas, discussed in the last issue, is likely to produce other troubling consequences. Already lay agitations--directed by familiar dissenters who are now joined by some of the confusedly angry faithful--are newly energized in a campaign to "democratize" the Church along the lines of Protestant denominationalism based on congregational government. While trying to build a national movement, and doing so with some success, the epicenter of this effort is Boston, where leaders are working with the professional agitators (they consider the term a compliment) associated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, or IAF. (For a reflection on the goals and tactics of IAF, see "The Uses of Confrontation," Public Square, April.)

While worried about some unanticipated repercussions, many bishops may feel gratified that the Dallas exercise in damage control, choreographed by hired public relations experts, has taken the scandal off the front pages. Not off all the front pages, to be sure. To get your mornings off to a stomach-churning start, you can click on www.poynter.org for a daily listing of scandal-related stories in papers around the country. But after Dallas it is not the story it was. For the time being. According to the count of the Boston Globe, it was the second most heavily reported story of the past year, next only to September 11 and the war on terrorism. It will almost certainly pick up again. Hundreds of civil and criminal cases go to court in the months ahead. They involve some very big defendants, such as the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, which may soon challenge Massachusetts for the title of trial lawyer's paradise. It continues to be more than possible that in the next year we will see a bishop or two, or more, in jail.

In the last issue, I described how the bishops, in what can only be called their fearful abdication of responsibility at Dallas, managed to sin against both mercy and justice. One reporter quipped that the headline following the Dallas meeting should have read, "Bishops Do What We Told Them to Do." That, unfortunately, would have been accurate enough. Under a relentless media assault, they hastily abandoned the native language and practice of the Church of Christ for the alien vocabulary of "zero tolerance" and "one strike and you're out." Already more than two hundred priests have reportedly been removed from ministry on the basis of claims, frequently vague and unsubstantiated, about something they did, usually in the distant past. I have received a surprising number of messages from readers protesting my argument for mercy and justice, especially my argument for mercy. Don't I know that Jesus said such scoundrels should have a millstone put around their neck and be tossed into the sea? Yes, I know. So maybe we should pass a law that anyone charged with the sexual abuse of minors is to be promptly drowned?

Of course there must be zero tolerance of sexual abuse. How many times does that have to be said? As John Paul told the cardinals and bishops in their April meeting in Rome, people who would harm the young have no place in the priesthood or any other ministry of the Church. Period.

Even if a once wayward priest poses no danger to children, it would seem that there are some offenses so heinous, so repugnant to common sensibilities, that if committed only once, and no matter how long ago, they would preclude the exercise of ministry. The priest is an icon who acts "in the person of Christ." If, for instance, it was publically known that a priest had, no matter how long ago, sodomized a ten-year-old boy, that icon is irreparably shattered in the perception of most of the faithful. Ontologically, of course, he remains "a priest forever." He may be a forgiven sinner and, transformed by grace, even a saint, and there are many good things he can do in service to Christ and his Church. But the egregiousness of his offense is an insurmountable obstacle to his effectively representing, in the eyes of the faithful, the priesthood of Christ. In the above instance and perhaps in others--homicide, dealing in drugs, or abetting an abortion--the icon is in terms of ministerial effectiveness, although not in sacramental reality, irreparably shattered. One can argue that this should not be the case. Against the Donatists, St. Augustine argued for the continuing ministry of those who had committed the ultimate offense of denying Christ in times of …