Thread by @SSawyerSJ

The US bishops begin their meetings today — and will discuss the #McCarrickReport. They need to remember that this is not just about McCarrick, but about an ecclesial culture that looked other way, at every opportunity, despite being warned.

A thread: 1/
americamagazine.org/faith/2020/11/…

There is no single smoking gun; there are decades of smoke in which no one looked for the fire causing it.

The problem is not primarily malice or lies — it's clerical self-protection and ambition. McCarrick's success in the church became his shield against the truth. 2/

And everybody else — lots and lots of bishops — to whom the vague rumors and anonymous reports came was able to decide to dismiss them. And they did, because it was easier by far to brush them away than to turn over the tables in this particular temple. 3/

Their focus was avoiding scandal, in the specific sense of avoiding a public disclosure of the rumors. This avoidance is the most common theme in the report.

The hope in such avoidance was not that he didn't do it, but that we wouldn't have to find out whether or not he did. 4/

Virtually no one to whom these rumors came acted from concern about the people who may have been hurt by McCarrick, a concern that might have led to investigations or better oversight of him.

This wasn't random: it was a predictable outcome of the way ecclesial culture works. 5/

This pattern's crystallized in one bit of the report (pp114-116), when Cardinal Hickey was consulted by the nuncio about rumors swirling during the run-up to a JP2 visit to Newark, where McCarrick was archbishop at the time. (Deep dive in the article at the top of the thread.) 6/

Two main takeaways: 1. Hickey says McCarrick should be presumed innocent "in view of his many years of devoted service and his well-deserved reputation as a churchman beyond reproach." — presuming innocence not as a matter of due process, but as a privilege of clerical status. 7/

2. What's missing here is any capacity to imagine that McCarrick could be devoted, talented, pastorally energetic and effective — all of which he was — and yet still be abusing his power and preying on people in his care. Which he also was. His clerical success insulated him. 8/

The reason that clericalism is such a central issue in the church's abuse scandal is that it doesn't require malice to cause terrible evil effects: just insularity.

Closed circles of ambition, status, and self-interest encouraged bishops—both in the US and Rome—to look away. 9/

As the USCCB discusses the McCarrick report, we don't just need a post-mortem.

We need processes that will interrupt and open up these closed loops. We need conversion away from clericalism on the part of ordained and lay Catholics alike. 10/
americamagazine.org/faith/2020/11/…

But specifically from bishops, we need the recognition that circles of power and authority safely insulated from lay people are not safe for the church.

Such insularity serves and reinforces motives that are not from God and not at the service of the needs of God's people. /end