International circle of bishops with Roman Catholic Women Priests call on Pope Francis to act
Marie Bouclin, a bishop with the Roman Catholic Women Priests, presides over a service in her home in Sudbury in 2016.
By Benjamin Aubé
Though they’ve been excommunicated by the Vatican, a group of women is demanding changes in the Roman Catholic Church.
Bishops with the Roman Catholic Women Priests are calling on Pope Francis to “establish a council to explore new structures for church leadership and order within the Roman Catholic Church.”
They say the constant string of allegations against male priests is yet another sign the Church must begin letting women and men with children be ordained.
The call to action comes on the heels of last month’s grand jury report out of Pennsylvania. It found that thousands of children were abused at the hands of hundreds of priests in that state.
Marie Bouclin is a bishop emerita with the Roman Catholic Women Priests.
“Men want to protect their children too, and if they’re fathers, they can’t be ordained either,” explained Bouclin. “So we’re saying you need married people as ministers of the Church, you need women in the church, to bring a different perspective, to change this system that has perpetuated itself largely through force and fear.”
Bouclin, who is based in Sudbury, said the Roman Catholic Women Priests are essentially forced to the margins as an “underground” organization. She explained she runs small services and prayer circles, often out of her own home.
The Vatican automatically excommunicates any woman that attempts to be ordained through the movement.
“They’ve marginalized us, so we can’t operate in the local parishes and such,” noted Bouclin.
“We’ve been accused of trying to have access to power, when what we are saying is, ‘Look, we could serve.’ There’s a shortage of priests, we could do this work, we’re qualified and we’re willing, but there’s this fear of change.”
Bouclin also spoke about why she and her peers continue to fight to be part of an organization that has not only forced them out, but also continues to be peppered with child abuse allegations.
“This is our Church too,” she replied. “There’s a lot worth keeping, but there’s a lot that has to change. Rather than walk away, it’s the hope of trying to salvage the good that can be.”
Bouclin added it’s a mistake to believe that child abuse at the hands of priests hasn’t happened in Canadian cities like Sudbury.
Among the potential victims of the Catholic clergy abuse crisis is one whose roots date to the early years of Christianity: the Catholic canon law system.
Each new revelation that a priest has molested a child and gone unpunished by his bishop has brought charges that part of the problem may be canonical procedures that fail to ensure justice for the victim.
The Roman Catholic church has long had its own legal system, incorporating a judicial framework and a complex set of laws, or canons, regulating church organization. Critics, however, say canon laws assign excessive importance to the protection of church institutions, encourage secrecy over transparency, and favor rehabilitating wayward priests rather than punishing them. While abusive priests can be defrocked for misconduct, the church cannot send anyone to prison.
The alleged shortcomings of the canon law system mean that civil authorities are increasingly taking the initiative to investigate Catholic clergy abuse on their own.
A problem of structure
“Because of its structures and because of how it has responded in the past, the Catholic church may in some ways be more ripe for these abuses to happen and fester,” says Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan.
Last month, Madigan launched an inquiry into Catholic dioceses in her state, looking for unreported cases of clergy misconduct. She took the action despite assurances from the Chicago archdiocese that it is already investigating abuse allegations and, since 2002, has forwarded them all to the appropriate civil authorities.
“The problem is, I’m not sure that’s accurate,” Madigan explains. “So there has to be an independent investigation that will allow for a full and complete accounting.”
Madigan acted after a grand jury in Pennsylvania reported in August that more than 300 priests in six dioceses had abused children in recent decades and that bishops had covered up the crimes. Attorneys general in Missouri, New York, and Florida are exploring the possibility of doing their own clergy abuse investigations.
Canon law vs. civil law
To be clear, child molestation is considered a criminal act under Catholic law. Canon number 1395 in the Code of Canon Law states that a priest found to have had sexual contact with a minor under the age of sixteen is to be punished “with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state if the case so warrants.” Within the church, defrocking a priest is considered an especially severe punishment.
“I don’t see this [abuse crisis] as a failure of canon law,” says Nicholas Cafardi, dean emeritus of the Duquesne University Law School and also a trained canon lawyer. “I think the deficiency was the failure to use the system.”
“Most of the cases in the Pennsylvania grand jury report happened before 1990,” Cafardi notes. “Even in those years it was a canonical crime for a clergyman to sexually abuse a child. They should have been processed under the canon law, and they weren’t.”
Critics contend, however, that one reason more priests have not been held accountable by church authorities is that other aspects of canon law weaken the incentives for punishment.
Canon 1341, for example, stipulates that a bishop should penalize a priest “only after he has ascertained that fraternal correction or rebuke or other means of pastoral solicitude cannot sufficiently repair the scandal, restore justice, reform the offender.”
In practice, the preference for “fraternal correction” or a “pastoral” solution can mean a bishop goes easy on an abusive priest, even one who has molested children.
“The bishop will bring the priest in, ask him if he’s going to do this again or if he’s over it,” says Carolyn Warner, a professor of political science at Arizona State University who has studied Catholic institutions. “In some cases, the bishop will send the priest for counseling, typically to a system run by Catholic priests who are specialists in this area.”
For Cafardi, a former advisor to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on clergy abuse issues, such cases reflect poorly on the bishops themselves, however, not on the canonical system.
“Our bishops made a choice in those days,” Cafardi says. “Instead of going the logical route and starting canonical criminal proceedings against these men, they chose therapy.”
Avoiding scandal
Church authorities who have tolerated abusive priests, or transferred them to other parishes rather than defrocking them, may also have been thinking of the canonical admonition to “repair scandal.”
In Roman Catholic usage, a “scandal” is “an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil” or perhaps draw someone “into spiritual death.”
Some bishops, Warner argues, may have opted to hide evidence of child molesters in the priesthood out of a fear that if such behaviors were to become public, the priesthood would lose honor and credibility.
“You don’t want to let parishioners know about these situations,” Warner says, “because that might cause them to question their faith.”
In the end, however, efforts by bishops to protect the church from embarrassment backfired by undermining faith in the church’s ability to police its own and by spurring civil authorities to conduct their own investigations of church actions.
“I think you’re going to see that demanded even by the laity in the church,” says Illinois Attorney General Madigan. “Otherwise there is going to be continued concern and a resulting lack of trust.”
One pope was a father of 10 through multiple mistresses, a man who purchased the papacy with mule-loads of silver. It is said that Alexander VI, the most debauched of the Borgia pontiffs, elected in 1492, even had an affair with one of his daughters.
Another pope contracted syphilis during his reign — a “disease very fond of priests, especially rich priests,” as the saying went in Renaissance times. That was Julius II, known as “Il terrible.”
A third pope, Pius IX, added Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and John Stuart Mill’s book on the free market economy to the Vatican’s List of Prohibited Books during his long reign in the 19th century. He also formalized the doctrine of papal infallibility.
What these Holy Fathers had in common was not just that they were badly flawed men putting forth badly flawed ideas: At the root of their moral failings is Catholicism’s centuries-old inability to come to grips with sex.
I say this as a somewhat lapsed, but certainly listening, Catholic educated by fine Jesuit minds and encouraged by the open-mindedness of Pope Francis. The big issue behind the budding civil war in a faith of 1.3 billion people — a rift that could plunge the church back into a medieval mind-set on sexuality — is the same old thing.
And most of the church’s backward teachings, dictated by nominally celibate and hypocritical men, have no connection to the words of Jesus.
If you’re going to strike at a pope, to paraphrase the line about taking down a king, you must kill him. Right-wing Catholics, those who think allowing gay members of the faith to worship with dignity is an affront to God, have just taken their best shot at Francis.
The attempted coup was disguised as an exposé by a conscience-stricken cleric, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò. He claims that the pope must resign because he knew about the sexual abuse of young seminarians by a disgraced cardinal and did not defrock the predator.
It’s a fair point, and one that demands a full response from Francis. But if you read Viganò’s full 11-page letter, you see what’s really driving him and his ultraconservative cabal — an abhorrence of gay Catholics and a desire to return to the Dark Ages.
“The homosexual networks present in the church must be eradicated,” Viganò wrote. Those close to Francis, he claimed, “belong to the homosexual current in favor of subverting Catholic doctrine on homosexuality.” For theological authority, he cited the infamous 1986 letter to bishops condemning homosexuality as “a moral disorder.”
That instructive was issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, designed to do to heretics what the Inquisition once did, without the stake-burning.
The bishop’s letter cites Old Testament sanctions against “sodomites” and a New Testament interpretation from St. Paul, who admitted he was not speaking with direct authority from the divine. St. Augustine, who loved sex and had plenty of it before he hated it, set the church template in the fifth century, saying, “Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication.”
What’s missing from these puritanical pronouncements, from then till now, is the figure at the center of the faith. That’s because, outside of condemning adulterous behavior, Christ never said anything about whom you could love. Nothing about homosexuals. Nothing about priestly celibacy or barring women from clerical ranks, for that matter.
Last year, while walking the thousand-year-old Via Francigena, I came upon many Catholics along that pilgrim’s path to Rome excited about the fresh air blowing through a Vatican that hadn’t opened a window in decades. The only cloud over these spiritual sojourners was the constant news about criminal clergy.
The conservatives would do nothing to fix this, but would make the church a global pariah. The old guard is infuriated by statements like the one Pope Francis made on Sunday. When asked how a parent should treat a gay child, he said, “Don’t condemn, have dialogue, listen.”
The way out of the present crisis is more light, less darkness and a few bold and dramatic moves. For starters, clerics should not be judging other clerics; let lay members, women and men, conduct the investigations.
Priestly celibacy should be optional. It’s an anachronism, certainly not one of the “infallible” truths, and may be one of the main reasons pedophilia is thick in clerical ranks. For the first thousand years of the church, married men could become priests, as they still can in the Greek Orthodox faith.
Women should be priests. Duh. When asked about this, Francis said only men could serve because Jesus chose only men as his apostles. This logic is flawed, as Jesus also chose Jews, and you don’t see a lot of them being invited into the priesthood.
A final alternative might be to look to the United States ambassador to the Vatican for moral guidance. That would be Callista Gingrich, who carried on a six-year affair with a married Newt Gingrich and became his third wife. In Rome, as always, hypocrisy is eternal.
At a gala dinner in the luxury Pierre Hotel in Manhattan in 2012, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, Pope Benedict’s top diplomat in the United States, bestowed an award for missionary service on Cardinal Theodore McCarrick and praised him as “very much loved from us all.”
But if Archbishop Viganò is to be believed, he was keeping a troubling secret — a claim that is at the heart of a new scandal that has thrown the church into upheaval and led some conservatives to call for Pope Francis to resign.
The archbishop now says he was aware at the time of the gala that Cardinal McCarrick, the former archbishop of Washington, was under orders from Pope Benedict XVI to stop appearing in public on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church because he had sexually abused adult seminary students.
Archbishop Viganò did not explain why he agreed to publicly laud a cardinal under sanctions. But LifeSiteNews — a website run by conservative Catholics — quoted the archbishop on Friday as saying that he could not back out of the event.
Even beyond the gala dinner, however, a review of Cardinal McCarrick’s activities during the years he was supposedly restricted under Benedict showed that he visited seminaries and ordained new priests, officiated at Masses and traveled the world representing the church.
A week ago, Archbishop Viganò released an explosive letter saying that Benedict had ordered Cardinal McCarrick to retire to a life of prayer and penance and had banned him from celebrating Mass in public, traveling for church business, giving lectures and participating in public meetings.
But after Francis became pope, in 2013, he lifted the sanctions and made the cardinal a trusted adviser, the letter claimed. That accusation has stunned the faithful, leaving many clamoring to know whether Pope Francis — who has vowed to rid the church of sexual abuse — had covered up for an abuser or whether Archbishop Viganò, a conservative detractor of Francis’ who was removed from his American post, was lying.
What still remains unclear a week after these accusations surfaced is whether Benedict ever imposed sanctions on the cardinal. And if he was sanctioned but permitted to flout the restrictions so boldly and for so long, it raises questions of how tough the Vatican really is on bishops implicated in sexual abuse.
Francis has reacted to the new revelations by refusing to discuss the matter and has neither confirmed nor denied the allegations in the Viganò letter. Instead, he challenged the news media to ferret out the truth.
The Viganò letter has pitted Francis against Benedict XVI, the emeritus pope, who stepped down in 2013 — confirming the worst fears of Catholics who warned that having two popes living as neighbors in the small, intrigue-laden footprint of Vatican City would be dangerous to the church.
Both popes could clear up the confusion created by the letter. Neither one has.
The silence has left a vacuum into which speculation, gossip and ideological combat have now poured, consuming the Vatican and Francis’ pontificate and drowning out the issue of child sexual abuse, a scourge that is devouring his church from within.
Archbishop Viganò has filled the vacuum with fresh allegations against Pope Francis on sensitive topics such as the pontiff’s 2015 meeting with Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to issue same-sex marriage licenses.
The archbishop argued in another detailed letter published on Friday in conservative Roman Catholic news outlets that he had personally briefed the pope about the meeting beforehand and that the Vatican’s efforts to characterize him as ambushing the pope with the meeting were untrue.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl, right, the archbishop of Washington, with Cardinal Theodore McCarrick at the Vatican in 2010, when Cardinal McCarrick was said to be under sanction.
The truth has been difficult to discern so far. If Cardinal McCarrick was, indeed, the target of sanctions by Benedict in 2009 or 2010, as Archbishop Viganò claimed, then he openly disobeyed the orders for years.
There is a long and public record showing that the cardinal at the heart of the scandal did not behave like a man forced to retreat to contemplate any possible sins — and that Archbishop Viganò did not treat him that way.
The cardinal was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress in 2011. He made multiple trips to the Vatican. He participated in a Mass there when his successor as archbishop of Washington, Donald Wuerl, received the red cardinal’s hat in 2010. He joined American bishops on their five-year check-in with Benedict in January 2012.
Four months later, he was back in Rome to sing happy birthday to Benedict at a celebration sponsored by the Papal Foundation, which Cardinal McCarrick founded to deliver millions in donations to the Vatican each year.
He traveled to Iran in 2011 and helped win the release of American hikers accused of espionage. Friends of the cardinal who did not want to be named said in interviews that they had no indication at all that he was supposedly restricted in those years.
Only in July, after Cardinal McCarrick had been accused of sexually abusing two boys years ago, did he resign from the College of Cardinals, at 88. Demoted to archbishop, he rebutted the allegations and is appealing his case to the Vatican. Through his lawyer, he declined an interview request.
For years, Benedict’s supporters, appalled by the direction Francis was taking the church, have sought to draw Benedict into ideological fights. He has mostly resisted, and his silence so far on the Viganò letter is in keeping with his promise to essentially disappear after his resignation.
Francis, right, greeting Benedict XVI at the Vatican in June.
Benedict, who promised his successor “reverence and obedience” when he retired, is now 91 and frail.
But his personal secretary and trusted lieutenant, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, has issued enigmatic comments. He told the German newspaper Die Tagespost that the reports suggesting that Benedict had confirmed Viganò’s letter were “fake news.”
Asked by The New York Times to clarify whether Benedict had placed sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick, Archbishop Gänswein responded in an email: “I have nothing to add or to subtract from what I have said.”
Pope Francis also evaded a response as he flew from Dublin back to Rome last Sunday, hours after the Viganò letter was published in conservative Catholic news media. In his customary news conference aboard the papal plane, the pope acknowledged that he had read the letter that morning.
But he said: “I will not say a single word about this. I believe the statement speaks for itself. And you have the journalistic capacity to draw your own conclusions.” He added: “When some time passes and you have drawn your conclusions, I may speak.”
Archbishop Viganò refused an interview request.
Following the pope’s lead, the Vatican has gone on lockdown.
Cardinal Leonardo Sandri, whom Archbishop Viganò also accused in the letter of covering up sexual misconduct by Cardinal McCarrick, rushed a reporter off the phone on Thursday evening.
“Look, I’m not in my office. Good evening. Good evening,” he said. And he was the most talkative.
The Times reached out to every cardinal and bishop said by Archbishop Viganò to have known about the alleged sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict. More than a dozen of them declined or did not answer requests for comment.
Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington said in a statement that he was never informed about any sanctions on Cardinal McCarrick. Cardinal Joseph Tobin of Newark said in an interview, “I was never aware of any restrictions.”
A visit to the Vatican Embassy in Washington yielded no information.
In the past, some of the offenders sentenced to “a life of prayer and penance” also resisted the restrictions, so Cardinal McCarrick would not be the first to do so.
But eventually even the most notorious, disobedient abusers sentenced to prayer and penance finally disappeared behind the walls of a convent or private retreat.
In 2017, the first allegation that Cardinal McCarrick had sexually molested a minor was submitted to the archdiocese of New York. Pope Francis imposed his own sanctions on the cardinal, the Vatican has confirmed.
His friends say that the cardinal slowed down a bit, but even then didn’t stop. He traveled to China and to the Vatican for several church dinners. He attended the ordinations of a priest and deacons. In May of 2018, he celebrated his 60th anniversary as a priest, alongside Cardinal Wuerl, his successor in Washington, with a Mass.
Then in June, , the New York Archdiocese announced the results of its investigation of the allegation they had received last year: As a priest 45 years earlier, Cardinal McCarrick had sexually abused an altar boy. And Pope Francis decreed that he could no longer work or minister as a priest in public.
Traditionalists want strict adherence to church doctrine. Liberals want the doctrine changed.
By Matthew Schmitz
Pope Francis must resign. That conclusion is unavoidable if allegations contained in a letter written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò are true. Archbishop Viganò, the Vatican’s ambassador to the United States from 2011 to 2016, says that Pope Francis knew Cardinal Theodore McCarrick had abused seminarians, but nonetheless lifted penalties imposed on Cardinal McCarrick by Pope Benedict XVI.
No matter what Francis does now, the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civil war. On one side are the traditionalists, who insist that abuse can be prevented only by tighter adherence to church doctrine. On the other side are the liberals, who demand that the church cease condemning homosexual acts and allow gay priests to step out of the closet.
Despite their opposing views, the two sides have important things in common. Both believe that a culture of lies has enabled predators to flourish. And both trace this culture back to the church’s hypocritical practice of claiming that homosexual acts are wrong while quietly tolerating them among the clergy.
As the liberal Vatican observer Robert Mickens writes, “There is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis.” James Alison, himself a gay priest, observes, “A far, far greater proportion of the clergy, particularly the senior clergy, is gay than anyone has been allowed to understand,” and many of those gay clergy are sexually active. Father Alison describes the “absurd and pharisaical” rules of the clerical closet, which include “doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t say so in public or challenge the teaching.”
The importance of not challenging church teaching is seen in the contrast of two gay-priest scandals of the Francis pontificate. The first is the case of Msgr. Battista Ricca, a Vatican diplomat who, while stationed in Uruguay, reportedly lived with a man, was beaten at a cruising spot and once got stuck in an elevator with a rent boy. (In Uruguay, the age of consent is 15.) These facts were concealed from Pope Francis, who in 2013 appointed Monsignor Ricca to a position of oversight at the Vatican Bank.
After Monsignor Ricca’s sins were exposed, Francis chose to stand by him, famously saying, “Who am I to judge?” Msgr. Krzysztof Charamsa suffered a less happy fate. The priest, who worked at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, announced in 2015 that he was gay and had a male partner, and asked the church to change its teaching. He was immediately fired. Both Monsignor Ricca and Monsignor Charamsa had sinned, but only one had stepped out of line.
The other rule of the clerical closet is not violating the civil law — or at least not getting caught. Francis defended Monsignor Ricca by distinguishing between sins and crimes: “They are not crimes, right? Crimes are something different.” This distinction provides cover for sex abuse. When countless priests are allowed to live double lives, it is hard to tell who is concealing crimes. Cardinal McCarrick was widely seen as “merely” preying on adult seminarians. Now he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.
Corrupt as this situation is, many Catholic leaders prefer it to the coming civil war. That seemed to be the attitude of Bishop Robert Barron when he called for an investigation that avoids “ideological hobby horses” like priestly celibacy and homosexuality. Bishop Barron is right to insist that accountability comes first. This is why anyone implicated in cover-up — up to and including Pope Francis — needs to resign.
But even if all the men at fault are held accountable, the hypocrisy will continue. The real danger the church faces is not ideological challenge from left or right but a muddled modus vivendi that puts peace before truth.
In 2005 the Vatican attempted to address this problem by instructing seminaries to turn away men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies.” But several Catholic leaders immediately indicated that they would not abide by this rule. Because Pope Benedict did nothing to enforce the decree, it became yet another symbol of Catholic hypocrisy.
According to Catholic teaching, every act of unchastity leads to damnation. But many bishops would rather save face than prevent the ruin of bodies and souls. If the church really does believe that homosexual acts are always and everywhere wrong, it should begin to live what it teaches. This would most likely mean enforcing the 2005 decree and removing clergy members caught in unchastity. If the church does not believe what it says — and there are now many reasons to think that it does not — it should officially reverse its teaching and apologize for centuries of pointless cruelty.
Either way, something must change. Marie Collins, a sex abuse survivor, warned that the crisis in the church is bound to get worse: “More and more countries are going to come forward, and as victims find their voices, it’s going to grow bigger.” Everyone who wants to end sex abuse should pray that the Catholic civil war does not end in stalemate.
