The Duty to Avoid Scandal

In an article published elsewhere on the scandal surrounding Washington Archbishop Emeritus Theodore McCarrick, I wrote of a phenomenon I called “the conspiracy of the well-meaning;” that is, people who temporize with or cover up evil to prevent other goods from being damaged by the exposure. What I left unsaid was that, for damning with faint praise, it’s hard to beat “S/He meant well.” All it needs is for a Southerner to tack on the end of it, “… bless his/her heart.” Marcus Junius Brutus meant well (at least as Shakespeare portrayed him in Julius Caesar). James Buchanan meant well. Neville Chamberlain meant well. It’s often the best you can say of someone whose naïveté, fecklessness, irresolution, or incompetence has led to disaster.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops is full of men who, on the whole, mean well, and who meant well when they drew up the Dallas Charter and “Essential Norms” in the spring of 2002. But they were trying to put out a fire with maximal speed and at minimal cost, which meant passing up the opportunity to do a full overhaul of the American clergy, including their own ranks. By tacitly agreeing not to address episcopal behavior then and there, the USCCB virtually guaranteed that they would be forced to confront it by yet another scandal.
The cover-ups and payoffs of victims and their families that led to the “Long Lent” of 2002 were failures of moral courage. The failure to address episcopal conduct at the 2002 Dallas conference was also a failure of moral courage. Of Boston archbishop Cdl. Seán O’Malley’s statement, Fr. Dwight Longenecker huffed, “Note that nobody is actually taking personal responsibility to get anything done. Instead ‘the Church’ must do this and that and the other.” But it’s worse than that—nobody is actually taking personal responsibility for what happened, another failure of moral courage.
Here’s the problem as I see it:
The solution to getting rid of the lavender mafia will still require the active cooperation of the pope, but it will have to originate with national bishops’ councils such as the USCCB. This is a thought to make anyone except the most hopeful despair. Even before the McCarrick scandal broke open, Western bishops, on the whole, didn’t show much backbone in standing up to the LGBTQI lobby, who would be more than happy to paint the necessary measures as a homophobic witch hunt. In its wake, we the laity are left to wonder how many of the bishops have been compromised.
But the Catholic principle of subsidiarity demands that solutions come from the level of government closest to the problem, with higher levels assisting only as needed. Or, as my dad used to say, “It’s your mess; you clean it up.”
There’s no more time for what Brendan Michael Dougherty scathingly called an “expressed intention to articulate standards endorsing high standards.” There’s no more time for feigned ignorance, buck-passing, and victim-blaming. There’s no more time for well-meaning half measures. It’s time the bishops remembered that they are accountable at the Last Judgment to Christ for how they’ve run His Church. It’s time for the USCCB to collectively grow a backbone, to stop being mere pastoral administrators and become true successors to the apostles.
Your Eminences and Excellencies, Reverend Fathers all: Get your house in order. Now.