What Signal Is the Vatican Sending?

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Are the laity worried about the new commission limiting the power of lay review boards?

Emerto: First and foremost, open and honest dialogue needs to happen. Picture bishops, laity, priests, and survivors around a 4-sided table to address the sexual abuse crisis. The findings of the survivors and the laity need to be strongly considered. These are lay review boards with authoritative power--not power in terms of changing dogma, but in terms of temporal affairs--addressing the crisis. The panels' findings have to be taken seriously. It needs to be a working collaboration between the laity and the hierarchy.

Allen: The Dallas document is ambiguous about whether the boards are sounding boards, to give bishops advice, or whether the boards are decision-making ones, where a bishop would turn a case over to the board and oblige himself to honor whatever decision they make. There are two documents. There's the charter, which is the overall policy, and the norms, the legal enabling articles. Most of the review board information is in the charter.

Canon law envisions that the only agent who can make disciplinary decisions about a priest is his bishop. Catholic theology understands the relationship between a bishop and his priest along the lines of a father-son relationship. The Vatican has always been concerned about other extraneous elements entering into that equation. The Vatican would want these boards defined as advisory and would also be concerned with how much access a board has to all the information that a bishop may be privy to about a priest.

The idea is that a priest ought to be able to tell things in confidence to his bishop that won't go anyplace else. If the notion is that the bishop is going to be turning over every scrap of paper and every recollection about a guy to the lay review board, from the Vatican's point of view, this might compromise the bishop-priest relationship. And protecting that relationship is a high value for the Vatican.

If a true dialogue between the laity and the bishops doesn't happen, will groups like Voice of the Faithful continue to exert financial pressure, as they did in creating the alternate fund for Boston Catholics who wished to withhold money from the diocese?

Emerto: Certainly if the dialogue is not opened up, one way is financial pressure.

Is the Vatican unhappy about the lay review boards?

Neuhaus: The primary worry is who has the oversight of the overseer. Who makes sure a bishop is doing his job? Traditionally, the answer is Rome. Some people think, understandably, that Rome has not done a good job of that in recent history.

Another answer that's been posed is that the bishops' conference should exercise oversight over its member bishops. But then the National Review Board was slipped in there by Dallas. And all of a sudden you've got a group of lay people who are overseeing the overseers, and relying upon the media to be the enforcers. Which is a very troubling arrangement, because it touches on how Catholics believe Christ intended the Church to be constituted. According to Catholic doctrine, the Church is governed by bishops who are the successors to the apostles, in communion with the bishop of Rome, the successor to Peter. What do you do with this national review board that somehow has been interjected into the government of the church?

Weigel: Everyone's biggest concern should be that a lay review board, which can be helpful adjuncts to a local bishop, not usurp the headship that is properly and only the bishop's. This cuts in two directions. Boards can attempt to usurp that headship, and bishops can attempt to deflect their response onto lay review boards. The question is how can the boards be helpful without usurping his ordained right and duty to be the final judge in his diocese.

The local bishop is the bottom of the bottom line in his diocese. One of the reasons the Church has gotten itself into this crisis has been a deficient notion of headship in the episcopate. Bishops are not ordained to be discussion group moderators. They are ordained to be the head of a local church. Now, any serious leader knows that leadership is enhanced by consultation. That's the role that lay review boards can play.

The norms didn't imply that the review board had absolute control or veto power over the bishop.

Neuhaus: No, they certainly couldn't remove a bishop. But as Governor Keating has made clear again and again, his intention is that by drawing up a list of bishops who are not abiding by the norms, and by this being made public through the media, effective pressure would be brought to bear in order to make sure bishops did their duty as Dallas prescribed it.

Weigel: Then one has to ask what's the binding character of that recommendation. What's at stake is not complicated. It's the reaffirmation of the responsibility of bishops to be the authority that they were ordained to be in their diocese.

Is the Vatican concerned about bishops turning matters over to civil authorities?

Neuhaus: Yes. One has to realize, when speaking of the Universal Church, that it's one thing to talk about the United States where you may have a high level of confidence in civil authorities. But in most countries of the world, you have governments that are very hostile to the church. Rome won't agree that the confidential files and workings of the Church will be put into the hands of hostile governments.

Weigel: It should be a concern for everyone. We can't frame this in terms of the Vatican against the Americans. The question of how ecclesial discipline related to civil law is fairly obvious in the obvious cases-when there has manifestly been criminal activity, the public authorities need to be apprised of it. But there's a whole range of problems of abusive behavior that fall in a gray area. What the Holy See would probably like to see, and what everyone should want to see, is that the local bishop have a reasonable certainty that an allegation of criminal sexual abuse has a serious foundation before he notifies the public authorities.

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