DiNardo carries reform hopes for many
Cardinal is point man promoting U.S. church leaders’ plans to address abuse
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the 69-year-old archbishop of the Galveston-Houston diocese, looked weary Thursday as he released the names of 42 priests “credibly accused” of child sex abuse. In doing so, DiNardo joined a flood of bishops across the U.S. releasing similar lists, owning up to the hidden sins of the church’s past and addressing a crisis that is, once again, shaking Catholics’ faith in their church.
But releasing the names, critics say, isn’t nearly enough. The pressing issues — the church’s next steps and pushing for more accountability of bishops — fall heavily on DiNardo. As president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, he’s the heavy-eyed face of American church hierarchy, the point man promoting American bishops’ plans to the Vatican.
And at the same time, DiNardo is himself entangled in an investigation. This November, local and federal law enforcement agents conducted a surprise raid of the archdiocese’s offices, searching for materials related to several accused priests. Among other things, agents seized at least three of DiNardo’s computers and one belonging to his predecessor, Archbishop Emeritus Joseph Fiorenza.
This means that the Galveston-Houston Archdiocese and its leader now face the same questions that have bedeviled dioceses across the country. Did people at the highest level of the church’s hierarchy fail to report credible accusations of child abuse to law enforcement? And did they allow accused priests to continue serving, sometimes near children?
On Feb. 21, DiNardo will represent American bishops at the Vatican’s threeday global summit on sex
abuse — a summit that many see as the start of reform, a make-orbreak point for Pope Francis, and a critical moment for the church as a whole. It’s a tall order, and Francis has tried to dampen expectations.
Some American activists campaigning for greater church transparency have high hopes for DiNardo at the summit. “Cardinal DiNardo must draw a line in the sand,” Terence McKiernan, president of the Bishop Accountability, wrote earlier this year, “and insist on … zero tolerance globally, based on improved U.S. norms. He must insist that the religious institutes, which have been given a free pass, be held accountable. He must insist that the church no longer shelter behind weak local reporting laws.”
DiNardo, McKiernan said, hasn’t always inspired confidence, but in the church as a whole, he’s a force for greater transparency.
“American bishops, flawed as they are, are way ahead of the global curve,” McKiernan said — a counterbalance to African and Asian bishops who say their dioceses don’t have these problems, that no changes are necessary.
“DiNardo,” he said, “is under pressure to bring home good results.”
Other observers say the church’s trouble goes deeper than secrecy.
“There’s a deep structural problem,” said Jason Berry, author of “Render Unto Rome: The Secret Life of Money in the Catholic Church.” “The church is a monarchy. It doesn’t have separation of powers, checks and balances. In the structural sense, there’s no real oversight of bishops.”
Many, including even the U.S. bishops’ conference, agree that the church’s 2002 reforms to protect children didn’t set appropriate limits for bishops.
“The credibility of the bishops’ leadership is bankrupt, including Cardinal DiNardo,” said Deborah Rose-Milavec, executive director of FutureChurch, a group that pushes for radical changes to the Catholic Church. “They’re proposing a sea of reforms that don’t promote the greater good.”
She joins Francis in blaming the sex abuse crisis on “clericalism,” a mindset that priests and bishops are special — beyond the reach of regular laws, dominating rather than serving their congregations.
FutureChurch’s proposals include allowing priests to marry, allowing women and gay men to serve as clergy, and allowing divorced people to take Communion. Conservative American bishops, such as DiNardo, are wildly behind the times, she said: “They’re still talking about birth control.”
Others, though, have a far different explanation for the sex abuse crisis. Cardinal Raymond Burke, for instance, has said the problem is that gay men are serving as priests. Most abuse incidents, he told an interviewer this summer, consist of “homosexual acts committed with adolescent young men.”
“It seems clear in light of these recent terrible scandals,” Burke continued, “that indeed there is a homosexual culture, not only among the clergy but even within the hierarchy, which needs to be purified at the root.”
‘A crisis of sexual morality’
Burke is correct in believing that homosexual men appear disproportionately likely to become priests: Studies have shown that as many as 60 percent of American priests are gay, and none has shown any fewer than 15 percent — never mind that gays have been officially banned from the priesthood since 2005. Obviously, almost all gay priests are in the closet.
But he’s dead wrong, academics say, in equating homosexuality with pedophilia or abuse. “There’s no evidence that homosexuals are more likely to abuse children than heterosexuals,” said Thomas Plante, a Santa Clara University psychology professor who has studied clerical sexual abuse for 30 years, and who’s counseled abusers and their victims. “If anything, it’s the opposite.”
Burke is even at odds with the U.S. bishops’ own study, commissioned from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. It said that clergy who exhibited homosexual behavior were not significantly more likely to abuse minors, and that boys were more likely to be victims simply because priests had more access to boys. After girls were allowed to become altar servers, the number of girl victims rose.
In the past year, removing gay priests and bishops has become a rallying cry in the Catholic culture wars. On new Breitbart-like websites, such as Church Militant and LifeSite News, blaring headlines top almost any incident involving a gay priest, and op-ed pieces decry the “lavender Mafia” in the church hierarchy.
It’s not clear that DiNardo meant something similar in August, when he said that the church “is suffering from a crisis of sexual morality.” But he’s recognized as a traditionalist, and the sorts of radical reforms that FutureChurch promotes are clearly not on his agenda.
It’s not precisely clear how far apart DiNardo and the pope are on ideas about reform. Commentators speculated that their differences lay behind the strange goings-on in November, when the U.S. bishops’ council met in Baltimore to discuss the sex abuse crisis. The bishops had been expected to vote on two proposals to curb it, but at a news conference DiNardo unexpectedly announced that the Vatican had requested that they wait.
‘Day of anger’
By releasing details of their complex plan to the Vatican mere days before the conference, some questioned if DiNardo and other conservative American bishops were trying to pull a fast one on the more liberal Francis, forcing him to sign on to a plan he wouldn’t otherwise approve. Was the pope — a Jesuit who loves debate — incapable of swift action? Or was the whole thing truly a matter of the Vatican’s not having sufficient time to assess a change to canon law?
Whatever the answer, the delay has raised the stakes for the Vatican summit later this month.
On Thursday, Texas dioceses followed the suit of many others in the U.S., releasing lists of priests who’ve been “credibly accused” of abusing children.
“It is a day of anger,” DiNardo said, regarding the 42 priests in the Houston-Galveston area, living and dead, who since 1950 allegedly committed “the most heinous acts against the most vulnerable people, children.”
The list includes Manuel La Rosa-Lopez, arrested in September on four charges of indecency with a child from 1998 through 2000, while he served at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Conroe. Despite a 1992 accusation of inappropriately touching a sixth-grade boy, the diocese allowed La Rosa- Lopez to be ordained and to move from church to church — where, allegedly, he abused another boy and a girl.
Sex abuse activists weren’t as familiar with some other names on the list, and the archdiocese’s release offered little additional information as to exactly what the priest had been accused of doing, how the hierarchy investigated the accusation, and how it reacted to any findings.
McKiernan, of Bishop Accountability, is pleased the diocese released the priests’ names and the churches where they had served. But he notes that unlike many other dioceses, Galveston-Houston didn’t include the years the priests served at each place — an omission that makes it far harder to assess whether the archdiocese removed priests promptly.
Bishops send detailed, “noholds-barred” files on suspected abusers to the Vatican, McKiernan said. “Shouldn’t that same standard of transparency apply when talking to the masses as when dealing to the bosses in Rome?”
Still, he’s optimistic. “What’s happening now,” said McKiernan, “would have been inconceivable 20 years ago.”