“Zero Tolerance.” The Watchword of a Church Without Mercy

But you Tolerate what you Should Condemn!

Sandro Magister

Settimo Cielo

15 February, 2019

There are two sinners for whom, in the preaching of Pope Francis, there has never been a shred of mercy: the corrupt and those guilty of the sexual abuse of minors.

Against these latter the watchword is “zero tolerance.” Francis, during the press conference on the way back from the journey to Chile and Peru, identified Benedict XVI as the first to adopt this formula. But in reality it does not appear in any document or discourse of pope Joseph Ratzinger and not even in the 2002 “Dallas Charter” of the bishops of the United States, while on the contrary it is continually proposed by the current pope as his pole star in the effort to combat abuse, most recently in the “letter to the people of God” of last August 20.

“Zero tolerance” - as explained at the February 12, 2015 consistory by Cardinal Sean O’Malley, whom Francis put at the head of the pontifical commission for the protection of minors - implies “the binding obligation that no member of the clergy who has abused a child will be allowed to continue in the ministry.” In practice, this means that someone who committed even one offense of this kind, perhaps decades ago, would be excluded forever from the exercise of the ministry, on a par with a serial abuser. And this even before the accusation would be confirmed by a regular canonical process.

The relentless pressure from public opinion against the Catholic Church explains this recourse to “zero tolerance.” The summit between the pope and the presidents of the whole world’s episcopal conferences, scheduled at the Vatican from February 21 to 24, will be the latest of many episodes in this siege. But this does not justify - in the judgment of many experts - the Church’s surrender to procedures that violate the fundamental rights of the accused and of the guilty themselves.

Since 2001 exclusive jurisdiction over crimes of pedophilia has been assigned to the congregation for the doctrine of the faith. This implies that when a bishop finds himself facing a case of pedophilia, after a quick initial verification of the reliability of the accusation he must pass the case on to Rome.

Since then, several thousand cases have accumulated at the Vatican. But as reported by Archbishop Charles J. Scicluna, for many years a promoter of justice at the congregation, only two out of ten cases go through a genuine canonical process, judicial or more often administrative. All the other cases are resolved by extrajudicial means.

One sensational case of extrajudicial procedure concerned, for example, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ, Marcial Maciel. The congregation for the doctrine of the faith simply questioned the authors of the accusations. After which, with the explicit approval of Pope Benedict XVI, on May 19 2006 it released a statement to “exhort the father to lead a discreet life of prayer and penance, giving up any public ministry.”

Another sensational case of hasty resolution concerned the sexual violence against minors imputed to the Peruvian Luis Figari, founder of the Sodalitium Christianae Vitae. Here is what was stated in this regard, in an interview in the latest issue of “Il Regno,” by Cardinal Pedro Barreto Jimeno, archbishop of Huancayo and vice-president of the episcopal conference of Peru:

“The pope says that Figari received a heavy verdict, but we were not informed of the sentence. When we went to Rome and asked to talk about it, no one responded to us. And as the presidency of the CEP we made a terrible impression when they delivered to us a statement to make public: we thought it was talking about the sentence, but it was not.”

Getting to the present day, the reduction of Cardinal Theodore McCarrick to the lay state was also the fruit not of a judicial process but only of an administrative one, in which the judge is also the prosecutor and decrees the fate of the guilty.

It is as if the phenomenon of pedophilia has been perceived in the Church as a permanent state of emergency, the obligatory reaction to which is held to be a body of rules also of an emergency nature, as inflexible as possible.

The United States is the country in which this intransigency is at the highest pitch, especially since the “Dallas Charter” of 2002.

During those years it was Avery Dulles, a cardinal and theologian of undisputed authoritativeness, who denounced the very high cost, in terms of the violation of the most basic rights, of the puritanical intolerance to which the Church in the United States was yielding.

He did so in a crystal-clear article for the June 21, 2004 issue of the magazine “America”:

Rights of Accused Priests: Toward a Revision of the Dallas Charter and the Essential Norms [Copied below]

In the opening of his piece, Dulles pointed out how just a few years before, in 2000, the bishops of the United States had criticized - in a document entitled “Responsibility and Rehabilitation” - the judicial system in effect in their country as being too rigid and vindictive, without prospects for a future readmission of the condemned into society.

But with the “Dallas Charter” - Dulles continued - the bishops were taking as their line of conduct exactly what they had rightly condemned in the civil justice system.

In particular, the cardinal showed how for one accused of sexual abuse the presumption of guilt replaced the presumption of innocence;

how the sanctions hit in the same way the perpetrator of a single act of abuse and the serial abuser, without any proportion between the fault and the penalty;

how the sanctions introduced in 2002 were applied, retroactively, to the actions of decades before, in substantially different contexts;

how the abolition of the statute of limitations engulfed the congregation for the doctrine of the faith with cases that were very difficult to verify because they took place so long ago;

how the reduction of the abuser to the lay state was a de facto exoneration of the Church from providing for his recovery and from monitoring his behavior toward potential victims;

how the reduction of an ordained minister to the lay state also raised objections from the theological point of view, given the indelible imprint conferred by the sacrament of orders;

how the outlawing of the guilty ruled out any sort of future conversion and reintegration into the ecclesial institution.

In short - Cardinal Dulles concluded - in the name of “zero tolerance” everything seemed to have been set up as someone who had committed sexual abuse against minors was no longer eligible for the parable of the prodigal son, not even if he repented and wanted to turn his life around.

Since the “Dallas Charter” 17 years have gone by, but the “dubia” raised at the time by Cardinal Dulles remain more relevant than ever. And at the summit of February 21-24 it will be seen to what extent the hierarchy of the Church will be capable of translating them into positive actions, in defense of victims but also of the accused.

On the scandal of the sexual abuse of minors, in fact, the Church’s very credibility is at stake. But in addressing this it cannot separate justice and forgiveness, because only by this means will it be able to remove it, and thereby make visible - as Benedict XVI said in a memorable discourse in Freiburg on September 25, 2011 - the first and true “skandalon” of the Christian faith, that of the Crucified and Risen One.