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America's Roman Catholic bishops left their spring meeting last week having further damaged their public credibility. In two appearances during the St. Louis conference, senior church leaders grossly misrepresented the bishops' record on dealing with sexually abusive priests. The claim by Chicago Cardinal Francis George - "What we promised to do a year ago, we've done" - was eclipsed in its falsity only by an assertion from the pope's U.S. representative, who said the sex crimes were "magnified to destroy the moral credibility of the church." It was a perverse display of dishonesty and commiseration by the very group that covered up decades of abuse.
This is not what the public expected to see. Meeting in Dallas last year after the sex scandal broke, the bishops, though defensive, seemed genuinely concerned with turning around the church's image. But they have spent the past year bobbing and weaving, twisting their promise to clean the ranks into some canonical parlor game. First they deny the scope of the problem. Then they question the authority of civil law. Then they water down the process for disciplining priests. And finally some bishops actively resist the very reforms they called for in Dallas a year ago.
What the public needed to see in St. Louis was a sober assessment by the bishops of their record on the Dallas reforms. This should have included a full accounting of priests charged and removed for molesting children, and at least some discussion of the culpability of individual bishops who harbored molesters, hid the truth, concealed records, tampered with witnesses or in any other way interfered with the criminal justice system. Instead, some bishops used the meeting as a victory lap to flaunt their unimpeachable strength - this after Frank Keating, a former Oklahoma governor, resigned as chair of an oversight board after likening some bishops's resistance to reform to the Mafia. The bishops' message was clear: Push too hard, we'll push back.
The bishops have lost sight of the human dimensions of the scandal as the monetary cost from victims' lawsuits grows and as the implications of what these losses mean to the bishops' power become clear. Individual dioceses have paid out between $138-million and $173.5-million to settle major abuse lawsuits in recent years. These are only the cases we know about - only a couple dozen dioceses out of the 195 in the United States have disclosed how much these settlements have cost. These amounts do not include all past cases settled before the abuse scandal broke, attorneys fees and costs, borrowing related to the sex-scandal payouts or the decline in collections and donations to churches. In Dallas, the bishops promised greater openness, but they haven't leveled with their parishioners (much less the public) about how high the cost will go, where the money will come from and what the negative effect will be on Catholic charities, schools and services.
It is too early to determine whether the bishops have lost the good will that came after Dallas. Much will depend on how cooperative the bishops appear in two progress reports, expected next month, on the extent of sex abuse in all U.S. dioceses and the state of new disciplinary procedures. The bishops' review board is also expected to address this year the role the hierarchy played in the scandal. The level of candor by the bishops will shape not only the record of a shameful era in history, but the realignment taking place between lay Catholics and the hierarchy.