Hi guys,
I’m sorry for the mid-week email, but I have to get something off my chest.
JD wrote about something in his newsletter Tuesday, and it has been rolling around in my head ever since he started writing it.
A couple of things have happened here at The Pillar over the last month-and-a-half and, while I don’t think there is explicit causality between them, the correlation is striking, and I want to talk about it for a minute.
The biggest story we’ve been covering during this time — and for us the biggest story to come out of the Vatican in some time — has been the Príncipi case, or what could really be called the Peña Parra case, since it is now principally about how the pope’s chief of staff tried to reinstate a twice-convicted and laicized sexual abuser of minors.
If we started The Pillar for anything, it was to report the stories that we could see mattered, and which no one else could or would touch.
I came into Catholic media in 2018, pretty much the week the McCarrick scandal broke. That story and that context formed me, and my approach to this work.
I spent my first year in journalism wondering how, how something as big as McCarrick could play out in plain sight for so long and go unchallenged. And, as a canon lawyer with a few years of practice in abuse cases under my belt, I wondered how the basic legal mechanisms of reporting and justice could have failed so spectacularly for so long.
The answers to both those questions became apparent to me in relatively short order. The legal processes failed because McCarrick was — for many, many years — too big to fail in the ecclesiastical world.
He was too highly placed, too well-connected, too well-financed to be held to account by ordinary means. And he was so influential as a tribal figurehead, patron, friend, and source to so many people in the Catholic world that he could count on any rumor about his crimes being dismissed as just that: rumor.
McCarrick could also rely on a knowledge gap in the Catholic press when it came to how abusers operate, and how the Church’s legal system is meant to work, which would prevent people from understanding what was in front of their noses —and make them willing to take any explanation offered to them.
All this came to mind when, amidst the deafening silence surrounding the Príncipi affair, JD wrote about an oft-styled senior and respected figure in Catholic media’s analysis of the case — so far as I am aware practically the only analysis of the case not published at The Pillar.
You can read JD’s reaction to that here, if you haven’t already, and I would urge you to do so.
For me, reading John Allen Jr.’s analysis brought everything I thought and wondered and learned during the McCarrick saga sharply back into focus.
It was John, after all, who said upfront that he declined to investigate McCarrick because “If you go after somebody like this, especially a cardinal, you lose him, and probably any of his friends, as a source,” and “if I tried to interview every one of these [bishops] every time I heard something salacious, that is all I’d be doing and I’d be out of business in a heartbeat.”
His analysis of the Príncipi/Peña Parra affair is that it’s basically a backroom curial politics story, an overcooked nothingburger.
And, he concluded, having had access to some of the documention, reasonable people can disagree about whether a priest groping the genitals of teenage boys — legal minors — under the guise of prayer is evidence of sexual abuse, or just “terrible judgment.”
If I’d read such a thing circa 2017, I’d have disagreed, but not been surprised. But in the post-McCarrick, post-Vos estis lux mundi, post-Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors world, it’s dumbfounding.
If there is one thing Pope Francis has stressed, in speech and in law, it’s that “zero-tolerance” is meant to be a reality in the Church, not a slogan, and all those laws and processes he has enacted are intended to be followed.
Clearly, there are still some people in the Church who never got the memo, and, as the unfolding of the Príncipi case shows, others got the message and have been subverting it ever since.
Of course, to understand much of this you need to understand what the Church’s laws and processes on sexual abuse actually say and how they work.
For example, an understanding of the DDF’s exclusive authority over abuse of minors cases helps you understand a lot about the Príncipi case.
The DDF doesn’t claim competence in cases, let alone fight for it, when the accusation is “just” questionable groping.
In fact, they routinely send those cases where they belong, to the Dicastery for Clergy, not — never — the Secretariat of State. The DDF only accepts cases where the alleged acts of abuse of the minor are of the most unambiguously sexual, serious, and direct order — and they have jurisprudence defining what that means in forensic detail.
An informed journalist would know that, and a responsible one would wonder if there’s more to the story than a curated version, seemingly handed to you by those defending an illegal intervention on a convicted abuser’s behalf.
And someone with an interest in, say, the abuse of power and the kind of closed clericalist networks which protected McCarrick, would look at a failed and obviously illegal — in the literal, technical sense — attempt by the pope’s closest collaborator to reinstate a laicized abuser and see something more urgent and problematic than a “turf war.”
After McCarrick, a lot of people in the Church adopted the policy of “zero-tolerance” and a lot of people said “never again.”
Some in the Church clearly meant it. For others, the policy is just a slogan, not to be taken literally. We’ve come far enough from McCarrick to begin to see the difference — if we want to see it, and if we choose to care.
We at The Pillar see it. We think it matters. And from Day 1 we made it our business to report what we see, because it matters.
Which brings me back to John Allen and his comments in the Vatican’s McCarrick Report.
“If I tried to interview every one of these guys [bishops] every time I heard something salacious, that is all I’d be doing and I’d be out of business in a heartbeat” — that’s what he told them.
And maybe he’s right.
Since we started reporting on the Príncipi case, our paying subscribers are down — we’ve lost revenue, noticeably. Reporting the things we know matter, giving them the attention they deserve and refusing to let them go or to be fobbed off with answers designed to distract might indeed be bad business.
Maybe it’s a terminal mistake to make. I don’t know.
But here’s what I do know: I don’t care.
We at The Pillar do not care if it loses us money. We do not care if it makes us unpopular in the Vatican press office.
Client-state Catholic media which turns away from abuse of power and excuses and minimizes abuse of minors is no service to the truth, no service to victim-survivors, and ultimately no service to the Church.
That’s a thing to which we said “never again.”
We do not care if doing Catholic journalism our way eventually puts us under, because we set out to it this way and no other. And if it can’t be done this way, we don’t think it’s worth doing.
That’s what The Pillar is for, and we will see it stand or fall on that alone.
Everyone is welcome to stand with us, or not. That’s a choice everyone reading this can make for themselves. The alternative speaks for itself.
And for those of you who have stood with us thus far, thank you. Thank you all and each. We’re going to keep going, together.
Because never again means right now.
Ed. Condon
Editor
The Pillar
