By CHRISTOPHER MANION
On Tuesday, May 21, Archbishop Wilton Gregory was installed as the new ordinary of the Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. He succeeds Donald Cardinal Wuerl, who had served as administrator of the archdiocese since he retired last year.
Archbishop Gregory has long been a leader in the U.S. bishops’ conference, having served as its president in the crucial years surrounding the explosion into public view of the abuse and coverup scandals in 2002. In June of that year, the USCCB adopted its now infamous Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. As USCCB president, then-Bishop Gregory worked with then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to ensure that the rules of the Charter, which were rigorous, even onerous, for priests and deacons, would not apply to any of the dozens of sitting bishops who were revealed to have covered up for abusers.
It is somewhat ironic that Archbishop Gregory now assumes the see once governed by McCarrick, who preceded Cardinal Wuerl in Washington.
Gregory’s appointment and installation are symbolic in many ways. His two predecessors in Washington were surrounded by scandal. According to priests in the archdiocese, he was reluctant to accept the Washington appointment, and he clearly had good reason to feel that way. The exhausted archdiocese is desperately in the aid of reform and reassurance. The new archbishop has endeavored to offer plenty of reassurance, but even there he has had to start from scratch: “I will always tell you the truth,” he said at his first press conference, possibly implying that this promise represented a departure from the past.
But reform? The archbishop is well aware that concrete reform of the archdiocese is beyond his grasp. At 71, he has only four years to learn the ropes in one of the most political and politicized sees in the country. Moreover, he knows that the most urgent demand for the truth — a thorough investigation of his predecessor, now Mr. Theodore McCarrick — will never happen. He and McCarrick have been tied for the past 20 years, and any investigation of McCarrick for the charges made by Archbishop Gregory would include an investigation of him. Who would conduct it?
Washington also features one of the largest and most powerful homosexual communities in the country. When Congress is in session, it also contains over 100 influential pro-abortion Catholic politicians at the federal level alone. Gregory’s two predecessors were homosexual-friendly. It is unlikely that the new archbishop will embrace a change of heart, mind, and spine without which serious reform is simply impossible.
Rinse And Repeat: “The Scandals Are Over…”
In April 2002, USCCB President Wilton Gregory told reporters in Rome that the American hierarchy could handle the fallout from the scandals. As Lost Shepherd author Phil Lawler reported at the time, it didn’t fly: Two days later, Pope John Paul II summoned American cardinals to Rome and read them the Riot Act.
“It must be absolutely clear to the Catholic faithful,” the Holy Father said, “and to the wider community, that bishops and superiors are concerned, above all else, with the spiritual good of souls. People need to know that there is no place in the priesthood and religious life for those who would harm the young. They must know that bishops and priests are totally committed to the fullness of Catholic truth on matters of sexual morality, a truth as essential to the renewal of the priesthood and the episcopate as it is to the renewal of marriage and family life.”
Seventeen years have passed, and our beloved bishops still don’t get it. After the McCarrick scandal and Archbishop Viganò revelations erupted last summer, they took a stab at handling it themselves yet again, this time at their fall meeting in Baltimore. There they heard calls for thorough investigations of the McCarrick Machine and of Viganò’s charges, as well as sobering news about the number of sitting bishops who had real problems with their own records of covering up abusers.
As the conversation was just gaining momentum, it was kicked down the Memory Hole. Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich jumped up and blind-sided USCCB President Daniel Cardinal DiNardo, reporting that the U.S. bishops had been preempted by the Vatican. For all practical purposes, he shut down the entire meeting.
After they had disbanded, Pope Francis told the bishops to go on retreat and wait. In February he hosted a meeting in Rome, advertised as a meeting of bishops from all over the world to address the abuse crisis. But major prelates were not invited. Notably, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI wasn’t invited either. The issues raised by Benedict in his sex-abuse letter — especially the homosexual cabals that had been nurtured in seminaries for decades after Vatican II — had already been raised in public by two senior cardinals who had not been invited — Walter Cardinal Brandmueller and Raymond Cardinal Burke. They were ignored as well. Discussion of those critical issues was simply forbidden at the meeting.
Will The Light Shine In Dark Corners?
Pope Francis was expected to fulfill his promise conveyed to U.S. bishops at their November meeting that he would personally handle the abuse issue. Finally, this past May 7, he did so, releasing his motu proprio, Vos Estis Lux Mundi, “You Are the Light of the World.” It contains extensive regulations that apply to dioceses worldwide regarding sexual abuse by clerics. Addressing the gaping lacuna in the USCCB document of 2002 that specifically omits bishops, Vos Estis addresses allegations against them. However, instead of inviting or even encouraging lay participation in investigations, the regulations are replete with clericalism.
We recall that this is the very scourge which liberal prelates, desperate to evade any mention of homosexuality, often identify as the root cause of the scandals. Under the new rules, allegations against a bishop will be investigated by his Metropolitan — the regional archbishop on whom canon law confers authority over other bishops in certain ecclesiastical matters.
In plain English, with Vos Estis, investigations of bishops will be conducted by other bishops. The motu proprio permits no lay participation, and no looking back: Once they are in force, the McCarrick Machine and the Viganò allegations will still be ignored.
Will it work? Well, to illustrate how easily Vos Estis could be manipulated, consider: In 2002, Washington Cardinal McCarrick, Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and Los Angeles Roger Cardinal Mahony were all metropolitan archbishops. As such, they would have been in charge of handling abuse allegations against brother bishops themselves, even though all three had flagrantly defied moral and civil laws already in place. A new law, even a papal motu proprio, would have made no difference at all.
Another irony: It was during that April 2002 visit to the Vatican that Bishop Gregory told the press that “there does exist within American seminaries a homosexual atmosphere or dynamic that makes heterosexuals think twice” about entering the priesthood, adding that “it is an ongoing struggle to make sure the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by homosexual men.”
He never said it again.
The struggle continues, somewhere deep down in the Memory Hole.
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