The Culture of Clericalism Remains

If you wonder whether the Roman Catholic Church has learned anything in the wake of the three waves of the sex abuse crisis, this report of the reaction to the death of Bernard Cardinal Law, whose persistent reassignment of accused priests and stonewalling forced his resignation as Archbishop of Boston, suggests that the culture that enabled abuse remains in place:

Make no mistake: There is a political battle underway in Catholicism today over child sexual abuse,” a veteran Vatican watcher, John L. Allen Jr., recently wrote in Crux, a website that specializes in the Vatican and Catholic Church. “And its outcome is uncertain.”

It is sometimes not clear which camp Pope Francis is in.

For many critics, Pope Francis has not made good on his early promise to remove the deep stain of child sex abuse from the church. A proposed tribunal to try bishops was scrapped. In June, Francis granted a leave of absence to Cardinal George Pell, the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses, so that he could defend himself in Australia.

In September, the Vatican recalled Msgr. Carlo Alberto Capella, a high-ranking priest working as a diplomat in the Holy See’s embassy in Washington, after American authorities sought to strip his immunity and potentially charge him with possession of child pornography. The Vatican drew criticism for protecting its own by whisking the priest away, but said he would face investigation and perhaps trial in Vatican City. So far, no charges have been filed.

And this month, the three-year terms of members of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors expired without any news of renewed terms or appointments, prompting The National Catholic Reporter to declare in an editorial: “That Francis has allowed this lapse to occur is worrisome.” The commission’s only abuse survivors had already left in frustration. Greg Burke, the Vatican spokesman, said, “The pope is working on it and will name members as soon as he can.”

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At the conclusion of a funeral Mass for Cardinal Law on Thursday afternoon in St. Peter’s Basilica, Francis will preside over the Final Commendation and Farewell of the Funeral Liturgy.

Ultimately, he will be buried in the small chapel between the wooden confessionals, adorned with the relics of saints and a centuries-old crucifix. Cardinal Law renovated the place himself several years ago, and supporters like Monsignor Di Ciocco believe he deserves such a place of honor.

“It wasn’t that he was a pedophile,” said Monsignor Di Ciocco. “He found himself having to manage a difficult situation. It’s not that he himself behaved badly.

“In my times, there was a different instruction. If something happened in a family, it was the role of the father of a family to hide it. Now it is all about the media and saying sorry. It was natural that he defended his children, the priests. We can’t criticize what happened then with the mentality of today. It’s not fair.”

The Monsignor's remarks are very reminiscent of those of Cardinal Dario Castrillon Hoyos in a 2001 letterbacking French Bishop Pierre Pican’s decision not to denounce a priest who was later sentenced to 18 years in jail for repeated rape of a boy and sexual assaults on 10 others:

“I congratulate you for not denouncing a priest to the civil administration,” Castrillon Hoyos said. “You have acted well and I am pleased to have a colleague in the episcopate who, in the eyes of history and of all other bishops in the world, preferred prison to denouncing his son and priest.”

In it [the letter], the cardinal said relations between bishops and priests were not simply professional but had “very special links of spiritual paternity.” Bishops therefore had no obligation to testify against “a direct relative,” he stated.

I keep hoping for the day when Command and Coercion is out of date, irrelevant.

That date is not, alas, today.

Clinging to the Wreckage

The Investigative Grand Jury Report regarding the Diocese of Altoona-Johnson, released on March 2016, unearthed yet another series of sexual abuse cases covered up by the Catholic Church's hierarchy, reminiscent of that found to have occurred on the Diocese of Philadelphia, as detailed in a 2011 Grand Jury report. Unsurprisingly, the state legislature is considering abrogating the criminal statute of limitation and extending the civil statute of limitations.

The Archdiocese of Philadelphia, led by Archbishop Charles Caput, has responded with the expected level of penitence, the t is to say, none at all; rather, Caput has led his clergy in a scorched earth PR blitz including ostracizing Catholic legislators who have voted for the legislation:

Ken Gavin, a spokesman for Chaput, confirmed that archdiocesan pastors this weekend in "many instances" shared with worshipers how certain lawmakers had voted on the bill.

"The bill is public and the voting records are public," Gavin said in an email Wednesday. "There's nothing wrong with sharing that information. Obviously, parishioners are very concerned about this legislation. For those constituents to contact elected officials to voice such concern is a very normal thing."

The push from the pews was not new or unexpected from Chaput. He used the same approach as bishop of Denver to help defeat a similar bill a decade ago. Other dioceses subsequently replicated the approach when statute of limitations reform took hold in their state capitals.

But some on the receiving end said they believed the effort went beyond simply educating the congregation.

Still, Rep. James R. Santora, another Delaware County Republican, said even stalwart church supporters like him were finding themselves under attack and unhappy about it.

"I believe everyone that voted for the bill is being targeted," he said, including himself in that list but declining to say how he had been targeted.

To Santora, the naming of lawmakers inside churches and in parish bulletins smacked of "electioneering." He questioned the propriety of the church telling worshipers, as he saw it, that they were not worthy of votes come November.

I'm not going to get into the legalities of this. Not really what I care about tonight. What I cannot believe is the same old playbook, the same old rationalization, and, most of all, the same old sense of their own rectitude, even against unassailable evidence, flaunted by the clergy.

As a deacon, I meet many clergy from many denominations, and have been enriched by those encounters, including those with many wonderful Roman Catholic clergy. But a devotion to an ages-old system of clericalism threatens to engulf all the good they do--and yet they cling to it, seemingly unconscious of the fact that they do so.

The Elbow of Thomas Becket

You have to admit, this story has a properly medieval feel to it:

On Dec. 29, 1170, four knights loyal to King Henry II crept up on the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in the city’s cathedral and murdered him with their swords after he clashed with the monarch.

More than eight centuries later, a bone fragment believed to be from Becket’s elbow traveled this week from Esztergom Basilica in Hungary, where it had been kept for centuries, back to England, where it will make several stops before returning to the site of his assassination.

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Becket had been a dear friend of King Henry II’s. But after he became archbishop of Canterbury, he resisted the monarch’s attempts to tame the church’s power. The knights, thinking the king wanted the archbishop dead, killed him. Becket was canonized in 1173, and he became one of the most revered saints in England. His shrine in Canterbury Cathedral became a popular pilgrimage site, and it was immortalized in Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” which followed the journey of a group of pilgrims to his tomb.

In medieval times, Becket’s bones were viewed as having mystical powers. According to legend, they could stop dogs from barking, and they cured a man who said he had suffered for 30 years from nocturnal attacks by a demon called the Incubus.

In another account of Becket’s prowess, a young girl who misplaced some cheese and who feared being beaten for the transgression prayed to Becket, who was said to have led her back to it, according to William MacLehose, a lecturer in the history of science and medicine at University College London.

The journey of the bone relic, which is held in a gold case, was celebrated on Monday with a Holy Mass at Westminster Cathedral in London attended by President Janos Ader of Hungary and Cardinal Peter Erdo, the archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest.

Along its journey, the elbow fragment will be temporarily reunited with a piece of Becket’s skull — normally kept at Stonyhurst College in northern England — before stopping at Rochester Cathedral on Friday and Canterbury Cathedral on Saturday. It will then return to Hungary.

And, if that's not enough, there is the fact that the Knights Bachelor escorting the relics to Canterbury did so in defiance of a curse, and with some unease.

However flawed Becket and his cause may have been, he carries a savor of myth, and a historical power of heroism that's lasted over 800 years. And people want touch that, even today. An odd atavistic thing, this fascination with relics--condemned in the Thirty-nine Articles, of course, but that one is more honored in the breach, even now--because the touch of the past, however desiccated, however withered, brings that past and all its emotional resonance to bear.

The Cardinal's Ghost: On Reactions to Pope Framcis's Amoris Laetitia

Pope Francis's Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia is, quite frankly, not a radical document by any stretch of the imagination. It reaffirms traditional Roman Catholic teachings regarding marriage, but adds that the Gospel imperatives of love and mercy should be deployed to assist those who are confronted with the often agonizing dilemmas of broken relationships. As summarized by James R. Martin, SJ:

Pope Francis’s groundbreaking new document “Amoris Laetitia” (“The Joy of Love”) asks the church to meet people where they are, to consider the complexities of people’s lives and to respect people’s consciences when it comes to moral decisions. The apostolic exhortation is mainly a document that reflects on family life and encourages families. But it is also the pope’s reminder that the church should avoid simply judging people and imposing rules on them without considering their struggles.

Using insights from the Synod of Bishops on the Family and from bishops’ conferences from around the world, Pope Francis affirms church teaching on family life and marriage, but strongly emphasizes the role of personal conscience and pastoral discernment. He urges the church to appreciate the context of people’s lives when helping them make good decisions. The goal is to help families—in fact, everyone—experience God’s love and know that they are welcome members of the church. All this may require what the pope calls “new pastoral methods” (199).

Details to follow, as pastoral methods are developed.

Additionally, the Pope affirms that

“Individual conscience needs to be better incorporated into the church’s practice in certain situations which do not objectively embody our understanding of marriage” (303). That is, the traditional belief that individual conscience is the final arbiter of the moral life has been forgotten here. The church has been “called to form consciences, not to replace them” (37). Yes, it is true, the Pope says, that a conscience needs to be formed by church teaching. But conscience does more than to judge what does or does not agree with church teaching. Conscience can also recognize with “a certain moral security” what God is asking (303). Pastors, therefore, need to help people not simply follow rules, but to practice “discernment,” a word that implies prayerful decision making (304).

Regrettably, this has already led traditionalists to denounce Pope Francis's alleged "cowardice and hubris" or to claim that the Exhortation "carries a distinctive late-Marxist odor — a sense that the church’s leadership is a little like the Soviet nomenklatura, bound to ideological precepts that they’re no longer confident can really, truly work."

But it's a third traditionalist reaction that really grabbed me; that of Rod Dreher, who converted to Catholicism as an adult, and subsequently left that communion to join the the Eastern Orthodox Church. Dreher explains his discomfort at the Catholic Church's moving closer to the position of his own denomination:

I have been an Orthodox Christian for ten years, and I have come to appreciate better the Orthodox approach to matters like contraception and divorce. In fact, I think Orthodoxy has a more realistic and merciful approach — and in the case of communion after divorce, Pope Francis’s recent teaching is closer to the Orthodox understanding. So why does Pope Francis’s teaching worry me on behalf of my Catholic friends?

A couple of reasons come to mind. First, Orthodoxy and Catholicism have fundamentally different approaches to understanding how marriage is understood in the sacramental economy.

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More important, at least to me, is that the Pope is loosening a teaching that is rarely proclaimed in the first place. I can see that I was too legalistic as a Catholic, and certainly the experience of suffering helped me to understand more fully that the law was made for man, not man for the law. This is why I sympathize with Francis’s pastoral instincts in Amoris Laetitia. That said, I know perfectly well how most American Catholic parishes are going to interpret and implement this teaching: as an excuse to ignore the teaching in the first place (as if most of them needed an excuse). . . .I don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church has never, ever changed its doctrine, and I know, it’s no longer my church, so not really my concern. But I live in this post-Christian culture too, and it bothers me a great deal to see any Christian church weaken its standards, precisely in the area of morality where the historic Christian teaching is the greatest sign of contradiction to the age.

Later, in response to a comment on the post, Dreher is more blunt, writing:

If Catholics do violence to their own tradition for the sake of arriving at a position on marriage I believe to be more correct, they may end up undermining themselves more than they help themselves. This is why I am not optimistic about reunification of the Eastern and Western churches. A lot of theological water has gone under the bridge since the Great Schism. Orthodox don’t believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, which is defined dogma of the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman church simply cannot toss that dogma over the side. If it did, I would say that Rome’s position had moved closer to the truth, but in so doing the Roman church would have done extreme damage to its own authority. This kind of thing is why even though I generally agree with Francis’s impulse to be more merciful to divorced and remarried Catholics on the matter of receiving communion, it’s a big deal, and not because conservatives want to be mean to the divorced and remarried. There’s a much deeper issue in play here.

(Emphasis added).

This approach is all too reminiscent of that of John Henry Newman's, as I sketched out in Command and Coercion:

yearning for divinely ordained hierarchical ordering was traced by Newman to the Apostolic Fathers, and translated easily into the Roman Catholic ecclesiology upon his conversion. In particular, Newman states that “[t]he Catholic Church claims, not only to judge infallibly on religious questions, but to animadvert on opinions in secular matters which bear upon religion, on matters of philosophy, of science, of literature, of history, and it demands our submission to her claim.” Newman acknowledges that in these claims, the Church is not speaking doctrinally, but “enforc[ing] measures of discipline,” and that “[i]t must of course be obeyed without a word, and perhaps in process of time will tacitly recede from its own injunctions.” He goes even further, saying that “in spite of all the that the most hostile critic may urge about the encroachments or severities of high ecclesiastics, . . . I think that the event has shown, after all, that they were in the right, and that those whom they were hard upon were mainly in the wrong,” and that one who speaks a truth, or seeks to reform an abuse, in defiance of authority “is just one of those persons whom the competent authority ought to silence.” Obedience to authority is a critical virtue for Newman; as he puts it “[t]he Church must denounce rebellion as of all possible evils the greatest.”

After Newman’s conversion, he republished his essay on Anglicanism, The Via Media, including in the preface to the revised edition defenses of the Catholic Church’s behavior countering his own previous indictment against it. These defenses, formed in reaction to witnessing what he saw as the Church of England’s sphere of sovereignty invaded by the state, sound notes that resonate in the defenses made by the Church and its apologists in the context of the sex abuse crisis.

Especially germane to that context is the defense of what Newman called the “regal function” of the Church, its ability to secure the obedience he deemed so critical to faith. Newman analogizes the roles of the Church to those of Christ:

These offices, which specially belong to Him as Mediator, are commonly considered to be three; He is Prophet, Priest, and King; and after His pattern, and in human measure, Holy Church has a triple office too; not the Prophetical alone and in isolation, as these Lectures [comprising volume 1 of The Via Media] virtually teach, but three offices, which are indivisible, though diverse, viz. teaching, rule, and sacred ministry.

Newman continues to explain that:

Christianity, then, is at once a philosophy, a political power, and a religious rite: as a religion, it is Holy; as a philosophy, it is Apostolic; as a political power, it is imperial, that is, One and Catholic. As a religion, its special centre of action is pastor and flock; as a philosophy, the Schools; as a rule, the Papacy and its Curia. . . .
Truth is the guiding principle of theology and theological inquiries; devotion and edification, of worship; and of government, expedience. The instrument of theology is reasoning; of worship, our emotional nature; of rule, command and coercion.

At various times, and in different situations, these functions of the Church must yield to the imperatives of the other functions. As an example of truth yielding to cohesion, Newman gives as an example the social shock and dislocation of faith that could have resulted from the discoveries of Galileo, and explains why the suppression of the scientific truth served a higher purpose:
All I say is, that not all knowledge is suited to all minds; a proposition may be ever so true, yet at a particular time and place may be “temerarious, offensive to pious ears, and scandalous,” though not “heretical” nor “erroneous.”

From here, Newman then goes on to explain that the use of “command and coercion,” as with suppression of information, can extend into other areas:

Apostolicity of doctrine and Sanctity of worship, as attributes of the Church, are differently circumstanced from her regal autocracy. . . . If the Church is to be regal, . . . she must be more than Holy and Apostolic; she must be Catholic. Hence it is that, first, she has ever from her beginning onwards had a hierarchy and a head, with a strict unity of polity, the claim of an exclusive divine authority and blessing, the trusteeship of the gospel gifts, and the exercise over her members of an absolute and almost despotic rule.

Notably, Newman insists that the Church must “protect the ignorant and the weak, to remove scandals.” Newman noted the respect for individual conscience, which marked the early church, including St. Augustine in his earlier writings, only to be replaced with a belief in forced conversion in Augustine’s later works. Finally, Newman reaches the culmination of this long train of reasoning:

Again: Acts simply unjustifiable, such as real betrayals of the truth on the part of Liberius and Honorius, become intelligible, and cease to be shocking, if we consider that those Popes felt themselves to be head rulers of Christendom and their first duty, as such, to be that of securing its peace, union and consolidation. . . . The principle . . . I conceive to be this,—that no act could be theologically an error, which was absolutely and undeniably necessary for the unity, sanctity, and peace of the Church; for falsehood never could be necessary for those blessings, and truth alone can be.(Blockquotes from Newman in italics; footnotes and citations omitted; all quotes from Apologia Pro Vita Sua or the Preface to the third edition of The Via Media)

As I note in Command and Coercion, I find Newman's willingness to subordinate the truth to clerical authority to be profoundly dangerous. Newman also explains and contextualizes the papal dread of scandal and the Church’s function to conceal facts which, although undeniably true, would erode the belief and trust of the faithful. Dreher hear follows Newman into very dangerous territory. And, with all respect, I think he’s wrong for the same reason Newman was: Christ taught that “the truth will set you free,” not the primacy of submission to authority. In fact, as Rudolph Bultmann's canvass of the New Testament shows, the numerous passages regarding freedom from the law in the NT strongly negate Newman's elevation of obedience to ecclesiastical authority to the supreme virtue. The NT leaves considerable scope for debate, as Bultmann also notes, to argue that the law, or at least the ethics undermining them, are not as simply dismissed as it may seem on the surface. I won't even get into Augustine's famous maxim, Love God and do what thou wilt--again, it's not as simple as it seems, and is in no way a carte blanche].

So the Newman/Dreher position is unbiblical, but, even worse, it infantilizes the laity, and encourages the hierarchy to cling to untenable positions out of fear. Newman’s teaching in favor of suppressio veri to avoid scandal, and preserve the Church’s authority, legitimizes the very behavior that drove Rod (and many others) out of the Church: covering up the sex abuse crisis to avoid scandal.

Crime and Scandal in Pennsylvania

This is extraordinary:

Three former leaders of a Franciscan religious order in Pennsylvania were charged with felonies on Tuesday for allowing a friar who was a known sexual predator to repeatedly work with children, including as a high school athletic trainer who massaged students naked, and pull some out of class for what a grand jury report called “private physical therapy sessions.”

Tuesday’s complaint was the first time members of a Roman Catholic religious order have been charged with aiding an abuser. While the church has faced thousands of lawsuits over sexual abuse by members of the clergy in the past decade, criminal prosecutions of the supervisors accused of covering up for abusers have been rare.

The complaint, filed by the state’s attorney general, Kathleen Kane, charged three leaders of the Franciscan Friars, Third Order Regulars — Giles A. Schinelli, 73, Robert J. D’Aversa, 69, and Anthony M. Criscitelli, 61 — with conspiracy to endanger children.

The three are accused of knowing about accusations of abuse against the friar, Brother Stephen Baker, but of not reporting him to the police or removing him from positions where he had access to children. In one, he was an athletic trainer for nearly a decade at a school where he regularly told students to undress for massages.

“They were more concerned with protecting the image of the order and more concerned with being in touch with lawyers than with the flock that they served,” Ms. Kane said at a news conference Tuesday.

Lawyers and victims groups said the prosecutions were a stark warning to the church that covering up abuse could lead to jail time.

“This is the missing piece,” said David Clohessy, the director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests. “For years, there have been pledges of reform, but we still see the same deceitful practices because those who stay silent or lie to cover up have not been held accountable.”

Regrettably, I think Clohessy is right. The Church's hierarchy is so firmly embedded in the culture of clericalism and avoidance of scandal that only the erosion of the taboos against secular law deploying criminal sanctions may have an effect.

Back when Thomas Becket was vying for clerical immunity from secular law, his adversary Gilbert Foliot sought to establish a balance between the legitimate interests of Church and State. Becket's martyrdom brought his cause success, and that tradition of immunity and the dread of the Church's losing its ability to command loyalty (as rationalized ably by John Henry Newman in his defense of suppression of inconvenient truths by the Church) maintained the ethical and theological bases for a culture of cover-up. It needed, and still needs, to be sandblasted away.

How sad that it had to come to this.

Parade of Horribles: The Altoona-Johnstown Report

The Investigative Grand Jury of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has released a report on sexual abuse and its cover up in the Diocese of Altoona-Johnstown. It's a shocker, even to my jaundiced eyes, and well worth your attention.

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette report:

Hundreds of children were molested, raped and destined to lasting psychological trauma by clerics whose abuses were covered up by their bishops, other superiors and even compliant law-enforcement officials in Blair and Cambria counties, the report said.

The conspiracy amounted to “soul murder,” the report said, with abuse happening everywhere from camps and homes to the historic cathedral itself. That description echoes that of similar grand jury probes into the Archdiocese of Philadelphia in 2005 and 2011 that found cardinals and other clerics shifted numerous known abusers from one unsuspecting parish to another.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane called it a “day of reckoning” for abusers and their enablers but lamented that no one could be criminally charged.

That was because the abuse happened too long ago to be prosecuted under the statute of limitations in effect at that time, or because the perpetrators had died or the victims were too traumatized to testify. But Ms. Kane said the investigation is ongoing and that anyone with information should call 1-888-538-8541.

“These findings are both staggering and sobering,” said the grand jury report. “Over many years hundreds of children have fallen victim to child predators wrapped in the authority and integrity of an honorable faith. As wolves disguised as the shepherds themselves — these men stole the innocence of children by sexually preying upon the most innocent and vulnerable .... ”

Much of the abuse happened between the 1940s and 1980s, according to the report, but many of the victims came forward in more recent decades to report the priest to the diocese.

The two previous bishops leading the diocese — James Hogan, who served from 1966 to 1986 and died in 2005, and Joseph Adamec, who served from 1987 to 2011 and is now retired — “took actions that further endangered children as they placed their desire to avoid public scandal over the well-being of innocent children,” the report said. “Priests were returned to ministry with full knowledge they were child predators.”

And so another skein of cover-up and clericalism is slowly, painfully unwound.

In 2012, I traced the phenomenon of this cover up back to its roots in the conflict between Thomas Becket and Henry II, and the rationales provided for suppressing the truth to preserve the institutional power of the Church articulated by John Henry Newman in his The Via Media. The argument I made in Command and Coercion has since been echoed as to Becket, and no refutation of my claims has been made that I can find.

At the end of the final published version, I wrote then that it was time for the ghost of Thomas Becket to be laid.

The exorcism is yet to come.

Lord have mercy.

"They've Summoned Up a Thundercloud": "Command and Coercion" in 2016

You know, I was really hoping my 2012 Command and Coercion: Clerical Immunity, Scandal, and the Sex Abuse Crisis in the Roman Catholic Church could become irrelevant to the news. But, as John Allen reports at Crux, my thesis remains depressingly relevant:

Given what a cancer the clerical sexual abuse scandals have been for the Catholic Church, one would imagine the Vatican would want new bishops to get a state-of-the-art presentation on best practices in terms of preventing such meltdowns in the future.

The Vatican has been running just such a training course since 2001 for newly appointed bishops around the world, and almost 30 percent of the Catholic prelates in the world today have taken it.

It’s more than a bit surprising, therefore, to discover that at least last year, the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, the body created by Pope Francis to identify “best practices” in the fight against child abuse, was not involved in the training.

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The presentation was entrusted to French Monsignor Tony Anatrella, a consulter to the Pontifical Council for the Family and the Pontifical Council for Health Care Workers, who’s based at the Collège des Bernardins in Paris. He’s a psychotherapist controversial for his views on homosexuality and “gender theory.”

Although his presentation was long on therapeutic analysis, Anatrella did a credible job of slogging through components of the Code of Canon Law governing clergy accused of sexual crime with a minor.

In other ways, however, his presentation seemed seriously wanting. For instance, Anatrella argued that bishops have no duty to report allegations to the police, which he says is up to victims and their families. It’s a legalistic take on a critical issue, one which has brought only trouble for the Church and its leaders. Why, one wonders, was it part of a training session?

Most basically, canonical procedures kick in only after abuse has been alleged. Presumably the goal ought to be to stop those crimes from happening, and in that regard it’s striking that Anatrella devoted just a few paragraphs to abuse prevention, using abstract language without concrete examples.

Let's not bury the lede: The instructor of the Vatican training course on sexual abuse is teaching bishops that "bishops have no duty to report allegations to the police, which he says is up to victims and their families."

From the Guardian:

A document that spells out how senior clergy members ought to deal with allegations of abuse, which was recently released by the Vatican, emphasised that, though they must be aware of local laws, bishops’ only duty was to address such allegations internally.

“According to the state of civil laws of each country where reporting is obligatory, it is not necessarily the duty of the bishop to report suspects to authorities, the police or state prosecutors in the moment when they are made aware of crimes or sinful deeds,” the training document states.

Even in the age of Pope Francis, it seems, the twin imperatives of "command and coercion"--a phrase I plucked from the writings of John Henry Newman, where they were used approvingly to describe the Church's duty to suppress even truthful information where necessary to maintain faith in the Church's authority--and of clerical independence from secular law, the dubious cause in which Thomas Becket died, and which was perpetuated in canon law to at least 1984, though there is reason to believe it remains substantially undisturbed, still hold sway.

So, clearly the scandal is far from over. Which means, damn it, that I can't leave it behind. You have to understand, writing the article had the exhilarating impetus of having stumbled across something that had not been, until I wrote about it, explored in legal historical writing. Just about all of the legal historians of clerical immunity--"benefit of clergy" as it is commonly called, through "benefit of the forum," or "privilegium fori" is more accurate, describe its rise and fall from the perspective of secular law's willingness to honor it, not the Church's insistence on it, and its use of canon law to enforce it. Even the great R.H. Helmholz and Leona C. Gabel tell the story that way. So, C&C was satisfying to write--I found a small piece of the puzzle of why good men could become complicit in terrible deeds.

But that's done. Now, if I pursue it further, it'll be working out the ramifications of the canon law process, and mostly a hard slog through the unpleasantness of violated lives and vows. But how can one let it go, when, the story continues, continues seemingly along the lines I wrote on?

So, I'm dusting off C & C, and additional research materials I received after its publication, and seeing if I can re-work it into a more expanded treatment.

How I wish it wasn't needed.