Disciplining Priests: A Synodal Moment?

In the past few decades, the Catholic Church has faced major challenges ranging from the sexual abuse crisis to financial collapse of numerous dioceses. One area that receives little attention is the deepening malaise of morale among Catholic priests. The U.S. National Study of Catholic Priests highlights falling levels of trust in their bishops, with priests living under the continual shadow of severe disciplinary action in response to grievances and allegations.¹ When asked to rank those who they would turn to in times of difficulty, clergy point to lay friends as their most trusted confidants while bishops rank last on the list.

Given recent history, some may view declining clerical morale as justly deserved karma for past sins. But has something gone off-kilter? Catholic laity have been among the early critics of the failures of the Church to address patterns of abuse in its clerical culture. Twenty-five years ago, I was among a cohort of laity in our diocese arguing for enforcement of clear codes of conduct and disciplinary procedures and warning that the failure to address these concerns was exposing the vulnerable to grave harm. In “Toward a Gospel Witness: Confronting Child Abuse” (HPR), I argued bishops urging forbearance and invoking Jesus’ words of mercy (“let anyone without sin cast the first stone”), should reflect on Jesus’ far less lenient and more pointed warning to those who would dare harm children — “better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”² When all else failed, there were even appeals to institutional self-interest warning the Church would have to pay a steep legal and financial price for its negligence in years to come. In those early days, such voices largely fell on deaf ears.

In recent years we have witnessed a much stronger ecclesial response to criminal patterns of clerical abuse. Today practices and procedures in the Church are often far more rigorous than those found in most secular institutions, including those in the educational, recreational, and entertainment spheres. Much of this is to be applauded. There is always more work to be done, but we are on a better path. And make no mistake, commitment to the protection of children and the vulnerable must remain at the forefront of our concerns. Allegations and evidence of criminal patterns of behavior must be aggressively investigated and prosecuted.

However, if history teaches us anything, confronting evil can also provoke reactions that exacerbate problems and create unintended harms rather than alleviating the wrong they seek to redress. Are we witnessing this troubling dynamic at play in current approaches to clerical discipline? New disciplinary measures have shifted the focus of bishops away from their shepherding and mentoring vocations toward more policing and prosecutorial functions. Priests are now the main target in their crosshairs. In some dioceses, hardworking, dedicated priests are being pulled from their parishes without warning based on a complaint from a disgruntled employee or parishioner. These disciplinary procedures often involve immediate suspension from their ministry and the inauguration of a prolonged and costly criminal-like processes to assess their guilt that can take up to a year or more. Grievances that, in other institutional settings, would normally be dealt with efficiently through standard human resource channels are triggering procedures designed for allegations of criminal conduct. Suspensions, combined with the secret, confidential nature of these lengthy proceedings, inevitably causes serious harm to the priest’s reputation even if the allegations prove to be minor or unfounded. The imposition of such de facto penalties such as extended suspension from ministry appear to violate canon law’s presumption of innocence until proven guilty.³

Arguably these patterns reflect a phenomenon affecting institutional cultures within secular as well as religious spheres. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ryan Grim warns of a growing culture of grievance that is disrupting the mission focus of major progressive organizations in the U.S. Social justice and human rights organizations increasingly invest more and more of their time and energy on internal grievances.⁴ Many of these grievances reflect distrust, disagreement, and discontent with management decisions or styles that individuals do not like, often for complex personal reasons. This shift of focus has been so significant that internal grievance resolution is now consuming more and more of the energy and resources of organizations to the point of jeopardizing their ability to deliver on their core mission.

A flawed approach to grievance may also reflect a lack of moral compass by conflating the harm caused by predatorial abuse with the various forms of distress and concern caused by problematic patterns of communication or social interaction. Cases immediately became cloaked in the highly charged language of abuse and harassment, precipitating a sense of crisis that requires swift disciplinary action. There needs to be clear distinctions between routine human resource grievances, such as workplace conflicts, workload issues, work style differences, and work relationships, and more serious cases involving actual abuse and harassment. The tendency to elevate all grievances to the level of predatorial power and abuse ends up muddying the waters and clouding our moral vision. When every slight becomes abuse, nothing is abuse. Grievance inflation shifts our focus away from those grave dangers in our midst that do require clear-headed vigilance and response.

A flawed culture of grievance derails leadership rather than ensuring accountability and renewal. Promoting an institutional mission requires leadership. The constructive pursuit of mission will generate challenges to staff and laity working with those occupying positions of priestly ministry. Servant leadership, however collaborative and consultative, will inevitably stir up discontent for some individuals working with or connected to an organization. Leadership is always a work in progress, inherently limited and imperfect due to human weaknesses, mistakes, and flaws. Effective human resources procedures should be designed to constructively and efficiently address miscommunications, tensions, disagreements, or conflicts that will arise. Development, reform, and conversion are lifelong processes, especially for those in positions of responsibility.

Grim points out that flawed processes for addressing grievances creates a risk-averse culture that leads to mission drift and resource drain. This problem can impact ecclesial as well as secular institutional cultures. Instead of concentrating on core goals and objectives, time and resources are diverted to addressing internal conflicts fostering a negative and contentious culture which can lead to reduced motivation and commitment to mission. The lack of proper processes to address internal grievances can also affect the Church’s public reputation. Stakeholders, donors, and the laity come to perceive the Church as dysfunctional, a perception that can negatively impact attendance, participation, fundraising, and overall support.

The data from the National Study of Priests — declining levels of trust in bishops, growing fears of unfounded allegations, etc. — suggest that there are grounds to warrant a review and revision of disciplinary measures in various diocesan contexts. Many priests feel detached from their bishops and under constant threat of being thrown “under the bus” if any complaint should surface.⁵ In England researchers examining disciplinary procedures in the Anglican Church are pointing to similar problems.⁶ Lengthy and heavy-handed disciplinary procedures that often involve the penalty of immediate suspension from ministry inflict serious injury and reputational harm on priests who may have made relatively minor pastoral errors or who have been the target of unfounded allegations.

Furthermore, are these procedures even effective in dealing with serious abuse? Criminal abusers are typically adept in grooming key stakeholders around their victims as well as repelling potential accusations through deflection, threats, or various forms of scapegoating. While laity are the front-line guardians of their children, despite all that has transpired, little or no effort has been taken to form and inform Catholic parents as to best practices identifying grooming behaviors and protecting their children from potential predators, both clerical and non-clerical. In this sense, we continue to pursue essentially clericalist responses in focusing exclusively on cleaning up the clerical problem and leaving laity to fend for themselves in dealing with the larger issue of protecting their children from a broader range of potential threats. And when action is taken, suspension from ministry may appear to wash the hands of the diocese, but the tedious nature of the disciplinary procedures still leaves abusers free to continue their abuse before meaningful action to protect victims is taken. In these cases, efficient and focused investigative speed is essential.⁷ Justice delayed is justice denied, both for priests subjected to prolonged and unfair disciplinary processes and for victims of criminal predators.

Both synodality and common sense suggest that deliberations on these difficult issues should not be confined to the episcopacy but should involve very substantive consultation with the laity who are impacted in all kinds of concrete ways by decisions affecting their clergy and community. Despite the vision of Vatican II and the recent Synodal initiative, Catholic laity have reason to remain somewhat pessimistic, perhaps even cynical, about their capacity to have any meaningful input into decision-making at the diocesan level and beyond. Twenty-five years ago, lay voices largely fell on deaf ears, leaving the impression that bishops were only moved to action when the secular arm of the law began to impinge. The bunkered offices of bishops tend to create cones of silence that screen out the voices of the laity and subvert the possibility of the kind of communication core to any meaningful expression of synodality. Input from the laity gets lumped in with the slew of complaints and grievances that are either trashed or fill some dusty file cabinet in diocesan archives. We witnessed this problem in spades during the early days of the abuse revelations.

At that time, engaged lay folk were pleading for action from bishops against the small, but incredibly dangerous, cabal of predators inhabiting the priesthood. Today appears to be a moment for laity once again to raise their muffled voices. But this time many lay faithful are coming to the defense of the large swath of our dedicated priests struggling to faithfully live out their vocation in these challenging times. There seems to be mounting evidence of a flawed approach to grievance seeping into the fabric of the church. The imposition of non-discriminating, one-shoe-fits-all-size procedures seem to be fostering a toxic environment that may be having a detrimental impact on our priests as well as the communities they serve.

Providing concrete guidelines for paths forward lies beyond the scope of this discussion, but some guidance might be gleaned from the concluding document of the Synodal process. For a Synodal Church: Final Document prioritizes the need for “increased participation of laymen and laywomen in Church discernment processes and all phases of decision-making processes” (para.77).⁸ Of particular relevance to this discussion is the synodal stress on the need “to draw on the skills of those, especially laypeople, who have greater expertise regarding accountability and evaluation. Best practices within civil society should be discerned and adapted for use within Church contexts” (para. 101). Common-sense implementation of best practices in human resources would go some way in rectifying the more egregious examples of heavy-handed disciplinary procedures.

The synod document also stresses the importance of empowering local contexts to address grievances and disputes. Responding to the Pauline directives on Christian dispute resolution would entail consultation and work towards the establishment of judicious structures of accountability in parishes, associations and apostolates rather than dependency on top-down episcopal procedures without any meaningful connection to local contexts. Such steps could help us along the path toward the renewed ecclesial culture envisaged by the Synod for the flourishing of priests and laity in communion, participation, and mission.

The disciplinary practices and procedures within my own archdiocese may be a canary in the mineshaft. The focus on policing, the flawed processes, grievance inflation, and the lack of lay involvement are all contributing to a toxic environment that is harming priests and the communities they serve. There is no meaningful ecclesial public sphere for exchange, transparency or input. Attempts to raise concerns through an array of letters by concerned and informed laity and petitions from parishioners to diocesan officials are effectively ignored. However, the challenges that require attention in our current context are pressing and multifaceted:

• declining levels of trust and morale among priests in their bishops, with many feeling that they are under constant threat of disciplinary action;
• grievance inflation — the tendency to treat all grievances, including routine human resources issues, as serious cases of abuse, which elevates the situation to a crisis requiring swift disciplinary procedures;
• ineffectiveness in addressing criminal abuse — threatening all grievances with the same disciplinary procedures muddies the waters and fails to clearly target the grave problem of predatory abuse;
• lack of due process — priests pulled from their parishes without warning based on complaints and immediately suspended from ministry while protracted and costly processes are enacted to assess their guilt (justice delayed is justice denied);
• problematic shift of episcopal leadership — from mission-focused shepherding toward policing and prosecutorial functions, with priests as the main target;
• unwarranted reputational harm — public suspensions and procedures that seriously harm a priest’s reputation even when the allegations are relatively minor or unfounded;
• top-down approach — a lack of meaningful consultation with the laity, even though they are impacted by decisions affecting their clergy and communities. This lack of involvement is counter to the synodal approach and the need for increased participation of the laity in Church decision-making processes.
• damage to the public image of the Church — lack of proper processes for addressing internal grievances can damage the Church’s public reputation, leading stakeholders, donors, and the laity to perceive the Church as dysfunctional, which can negatively impact attendance, participation, fundraising, and overall support.
• mission drift — flawed disciplinary processes can lead to a risk-averse culture, diverting time and resources away from core goals and objectives and fostering a negative and contentious culture that reduces motivation and commitment to mission.

Newman cautioned that “time is short, eternity is long.”⁹ Faith is marked by a sense of urgency set against the mystery of eternity. Addressing some of the current challenges facing our priests is entwined with the search for synodality. This task requires an urgency of faith which, in Newman’s words “ventures and hazards deliberately, seriously, soberly, piously, and humbly, counting the cost and delighting in the sacrifice.”¹⁰ To this exhortation we might add, “ventures and hazards synodally,” pursuing open consultation with the lay faithful which Newman so longed for.