Paralysis and Anguish: How a Meeting of Bishops Ended With No Action on Sex Abuse

BALTIMORE — After five relentless months of sexual abuse revelations, America’s Roman Catholic bishops trooped into the final public session of their national meeting this week determined to show outraged parishioners back home that they were taking some action — any action — to respond to the crisis.

A bishop from Michigan took to the microphone Wednesday and proposed a resolution that seemed to reflect a widespread demand for transparency: It said that the bishops should “encourage” the Vatican to release all documentation possible on the alleged misconduct of former Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, who had been promoted to the church’s highest ranks despite years of warnings that he had coerced young men studying for the priesthood to sleep in his bed.

“This is not going to solve everything,” said the bishop, Earl A. Boyea, of Lansing. “It is just one little text that I’ve proposed for all of us.”

But even on this “one little text,” the bishops could not find consensus. The vote was almost evenly split over an amendment to add one word — “soon” — to the request to the Vatican to release the documents. The resolution failed 137-83, with 5 abstentions.

The bishops’ paralysis threatened to deepen the damage to a church that has been slowly bleeding members since the last major explosion of the sexual abuse scandal in the United States, in 2002. Some Catholics are renouncing their membership, saying they have had enough. Others are attending Mass dressed in black to show they are in mourning.

Parishioners are withholding contributions from their diocese or dropping postcards with two pennies taped on into the collection basket — a literal expression of putting in their “two cents.” Bishops who have held public “listening sessions” in parishes have been castigated by furious parents. Though it is too soon for official church statistics to assess the effects, Catholic leaders say the cost to the church is unmistakable.

“I’m talking about longtime, cradle Catholics who were very involved in our parish,” said Colleen McCahill, a laywoman who is the pastoral associate at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Baltimore, speaking of the parishioners who have come to her recently to say they are leaving.

Bishop Robert E. Barron, an auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, cited statistics showing that in recent years, even before this latest scandal, for every 1 convert to Catholicism, there are more than 6 who leave. He said in an interview that he was supposed to give a presentation to the bishops meeting on how the church could attract people who claim no religious identity, but that it was postponed in order to focus on abuse.

“This is a credibility issue,” he said. “And without credibility, we can’t possibly evangelize.”

The meltdown over the summer came right when many American Catholics thought they had turned the corner on the abuse scandal. When the bishops conference last met, in mid-June in Fort Lauderdale, the crisis on the agenda then was how to help immigrants and families separated at the border. They were also in the process of writing a landmark statement on racism.

Five days later, the New York archdiocese announced that McCarrick had been removed from ministry after it received credible allegations that he had molested an altar boy 47 years earlier. Two New Jersey dioceses also publicly acknowledged for the first time that their offices had paid out settlements years before to two seminarians who accused the cardinal of sexual misconduct. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times found that a whistleblower had tried to warn the Vatican about the cardinal’s behavior before he was made archbishop of Washington, a prominent seat.

Then in August, a grand jury in Pennsylvania released a report finding 300 priests abused more than 1,000 children over 50 years and alleging cover-ups by some sitting bishops. Attorneys general in at least a dozen states gradually opened investigations, and the federal government has ordered bishops not to destroy documents related to abusive priests.

“The summer of shame has marked a turning point in the way that Catholics, especially American Catholics, are perceiving the church,” Cathleen Kaveny, a Catholic legal and moral scholar at Boston College, said at a symposium in Baltimore on Sunday, a day before the bishops started meeting. “Many people are not seeing the sexual abuse crisis as an aberration within the system, but they’re seeing it as something that really runs throughout the system, that’s enabled by the system.”

The bishops came to their meeting in Baltimore aware that they embody the system and to demonstrate that they hear the cries of the laity for reform. Cardinal Sean P. O’Malley, who was assigned to Boston in 2002 to clean up the scandal there and has become Pope Francis’ American point man on the abuse issue, told the bishops he agreed with them about “how important it is that we come out of this meeting with some very concrete action, so that people will not be convinced that the church is incapable of governing ourselves.”

But they found themselves wedged between their impatient American parishioners and the Vatican bureaucracy. The bishops were startled to learn Monday morning, as their meeting opened, that the Vatican had ordered them to delay voting on any of the measures they had proposed to make it easier to report, judge and discipline bishops accused of sexually abusing children or adults. Leading bishops speculated that the Vatican did not want the American bishops to get out ahead of a summit meeting in Rome next February for the presidents of all the national bishops conferences to discuss church polices on sexual abuse.

Nevertheless, the American bishops proceeded to discuss the measures, saying they wanted to give their president a clear mandate to take to the Rome meeting. But it soon became clear that they were deeply divided, especially over a proposal to appoint a panel predominantly made up of laypeople to hear accusations of misconduct against bishops.

In the end, the only resolution related to sexual abuse that the bishops voted on was the ill-fated proposal from the bishop from Michigan to encourage the Vatican to release the McCarrick documents.

“We should be grateful that Donald Trump is president because he dominates the news cycle,” Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami said during the bishops’ discussions. “If he didn’t, we would have a lot more bad press.”

At that, several bishops seated at the long rows of tables could be seen burying their faces in their palms.