McCarrick was under secret restrictions and seems to have violated them flagrantly. It is very doubtful that he was the only one. There are a lot of bishops and most of them don't make the news when they are disciplined.
We really only have 3 levels of clergy. It seems like if you're tracking safe environment stuff, you probably want to also track the deacons, and if you're tracking "in good standing" stuff, you probably want to track them all.
If you're already setting up the system, expanding it to include a few dozen bishops probably isn't a big deal, logistically. Politically is another matter, but that goes to the hierarchy's current practice of covering up for bishops. But I figured I'd ask rather than assume.
Yes, bishops are exempt from the “letter of good standing” process. This is because the Bishop’s employees/reps vouch for the good standing of the priests and that they have faculties from the bishop. Bishops have faculties by being bishops. Now, the safe environment thing is another question but again, it is a logical problem for a subordinate to vouch for his boss.
It is the same reason a Head of State does not need a passport. A passport is basically the head of state asking that the individual identified be given every courtesy and protection. The head of state can just ask that himself.
(There is a story locally about when Queen Elizabeth II came to Kentucky on a private visit to see some horse breeders. She landed directly at Lexington (or maybe Louisville) airport, and customs asked for her passport. There was a delay to convince the agent that as head of state, she did not need a passport.)
There is already a federated, distributed database: in the various chanceries and parishes. The problem with creating a central database is that you now have to keep the two in sync. That will always be more costly than continuing to keep the existing one up to date with *reality* (the original database).
What flabbergasts me is the use of US Mail for the transactions (query and response). The low-cost next step is to use email whenever possible. The only friction reduction the conference could provide would be to standardize the mailbox names for inquiries: "priest.status@...diocese.org", etc. Signed and encrypted email is widely available and should be used for this application.
Mail? They don’t even fax the information over? Faxes are actually more secure than e-mail or snail mail and as far as I know, faxes are unhackable too. Fax machines seem to be making a bit of a comeback.
That seems like common sense to have a data base. It would make things much smoother than having to call the chancery and have them fax things. It is a combersome process.
> “ It is easy to imagine situations in which a priest’s status changed — his faculties were suspended or he was temporarily prohibited from ministry — and the database not updated. And it is easy to think of the potential implications of that situation.”
How is that different from the diocesan directory being on the website but outdated? Seems like a “last updated/confirmed” entry is as good as where we’re at.
What I really want to know is *who* is being deceptive: the activist, semi-disgraced-kicked-out-of-his-religious-order priest who claims to be incardinated in a particular diocese or said diocese which has never publicly listed him in their directory? Fr. Joh Dear and Diocese of Monterey I’m looking at you. It would be nice to have a place to confirm such claims that was basically authoritative.
I have started to call this problem of adequate participation in entering accurate data "the Salesforce effect," as an organizational problem for many is trying to get corporate business development teams to modify existing processes that depend on email/zoom/notebooks/phone calls to depend mainly on a "single source of truth" from a data collection perspective. In some environments, the incentive can come naturally, but sometimes the process needs to change in a way that folks who are "letters of good standing generators" just don't cooperate with.
From a civil liability standpoint, that impact can vary depending on the organization that staff member is a part of (i.e. compare an administrator for the USCCB against a secretary at a parish whose civil biz org in the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington is organized under a non-profit Delaware LLC). The threat of civil liability can potentially incentivize staff members to "get it right" and use the single source of data truth; but in the distant wake of Spotlight/McCarrick, how much more cash can dioceses and parishes afford to lose just to learn a lesson about effective digital implementation of safe environment guidelines?
I have been working out in my mind how to make a secure app that would enable anyone to verify a cleric's ministry status. The security would be relatively easy.
Then it dawned on me that this is likely not what Bishops want. To get a letter of suitability requires a form to someone in the chancery with all the details, and the letter of suitability is then sent to the other diocese. In other words, the chancery (Bishop) knows exactly when a priest is away, what he is doing, and where he is.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, because this level of control and surveillance (if you want to view it cynically) actually lets a lot slip through the cracks from an actual security and quality control perspective. I am wary of centralization (what if the database were hacked, what if a nefarious actor gained access, etc) but it’s clear that the decentralized system has its flaws too.
When I entered the seminary, I went to get my baptismal certificate. There were no notations whatsoever, as the secretary said "the pastor says its only important to record marriages." That being said, I had to go do the legwork to get proof of my other sacraments from the parish I did them at.
Years later, I ended up getting married. Obviously, I needed another copy of my baptismal certificate, which still didn't note my First Communion or Confirmation. Only this time, the new administrator charged me $20 for an incomplete record.
That being said, multply these inconsistencies by however many parishes exist in this world. My wife is a parish secretary. A very transient, immigrant population made up the last parish she worked at. She told me several times how difficult it was to send any type of sacramental records (let alone receive confirmation of annotations to records) to distant places that didn't have even fax or reliable mail services.
As someone professionally engaged in information technology, I'm going to come at this from a different angle:
"The technology is the simplest part of an initiative like that, and a platform could likely be programmed by a capable expert in a matter of hours." -JD Flynn
Respectfully, no. Simplest, maybe, but not simple. Just making the platform takes physical resources to run the thing, and intellectual resources to design, implement, and maintain it. To do it right is expensive and time consuming, regardless of whether it's done directly by the USCCB or outsourced. Doing it wrong sets up the next data breach headline.
I could very well be more pessimistic than warranted. Without completely doxxing myself, my experience is limited and there is a variety of opinion in IT, just like any other field.
But I would be shocked if some centralized system like Brazil's cost less than 8 figures, just to set up.
I think there are ways to design for these problems especially regarding suitability.
For the centralization/liability problem, have the system be federated instead of centralized. Kind of like email: Gmail and AOL both have their own email systems and software, run on their own servers, but users of one system can send emails to users of the other system without a problem. Maybe some dioceses implement the same information system from a certain company, other dioceses develop their own, but since they're based on the same standards these different systems can still communicate with each other, and if a diocese doesn't have the means (or desire) to keep such a system updated, they just keep doing things the way we're doing them now.
Possible example: Fr. Bob of Diocese A is celebrating a wedding in Diocese B. He logs into Diocese A's system and requests a letter of suitability be sent to Diocese B's system. Diocese A's Vicar for Clergy's office manually confirm the request and a digital certificate of suitability is sent to Diocese B's system, with an expiration date set by Diocese A (e.g. 30 days). Diocese A assumes the responsibility to keep this record updated until the expiration date.
Diocese B receives the certificate of suitability and if needed can "refresh" the certificate the day of the wedding to make sure Fr Bob is still in good standing. Diocese B's system asks Diocese A's system if there have been any changes and because Diocese A has promised to keep this record updated, Diocese A's system can respond to this request automatically. Once the certificate expires, Diocese B refreshing the certificate will result in a new request being sent to Diocese A for manual confirmation, and if Diocese A in the meantime has decided to stop using this system and go back to paper, Diocese B won't be sitting there with outdated information and Diocese A won't be liable for records it didn't agree to keep updated.
If Diocese C also wants to check Fr Bob's suitability, they won't be able to until Diocese A's Vicar for Clergy's office manually approves the request and issues a certificate with an expiration date to Diocese C. This ensures Diocese A is opting-in to the responsibility of keeping this record updated and has a record of all the places Fr Bob is ministering.
Maybe Diocese B wants a more automated system: they can develop a system where they promise their records will always be updated immediately. Diocese C requests a certificate of suitability from Diocese B's system. Diocese B's system automatically responds with a certificate with like a 1 hour expiration and logs the diocese that requested it.
Because these systems are federated and not centralized, they can communicate with one another but every diocese can set the parameters so their own system behaves as they need it to, and no diocese needs to implement a system if they don't have the means or desire to do so.
If the diocese wants to make portions of this open to the public, that's something they can opt into. Alice can look up Fr Bob's status on Diocese A's system and it gives his status along with the last time it was updated. Diocese A commits to updating its public records once a month. If this particular record hasn't been manually confirmed in over a month, it gives an error instead of giving stale information. If Diocese B doesn't want to take on that responsibility of keeping public records updated, they don't have to.
I imagine the biggest opponents of such a system are actually all of the companies that already store and profit from American Catholic data. Almost every diocese and parish in the country has subscriptions to at least one of:
- Parish Data Systems (ACS)
- Ministry Platform (ACS)
- eCatholic
- Camino
- Pushpay
- OSV Manager
- Teclesia
- ParishSOFT
and so on…
Data on American Catholic clergy, parishes, and parishioners is easily a multi-million dollar cottage industry. Those are probably the same groups most interested in not “nationalizing“ clergy and sacramental data.
I noticed this article specified "priests". Are bishops exempt?
You mean if Abp. Viganó shows up in my parish, I should ask him for his credentials?
McCarrick was under secret restrictions and seems to have violated them flagrantly. It is very doubtful that he was the only one. There are a lot of bishops and most of them don't make the news when they are disciplined.
Well, if one begins with bishops, where would one stop?
Seriously, the article was about solving a high-volume problem. For the bishops and above, The Pillar is the best we've got.
We really only have 3 levels of clergy. It seems like if you're tracking safe environment stuff, you probably want to also track the deacons, and if you're tracking "in good standing" stuff, you probably want to track them all.
If you're already setting up the system, expanding it to include a few dozen bishops probably isn't a big deal, logistically. Politically is another matter, but that goes to the hierarchy's current practice of covering up for bishops. But I figured I'd ask rather than assume.
Yes, bishops are exempt from the “letter of good standing” process. This is because the Bishop’s employees/reps vouch for the good standing of the priests and that they have faculties from the bishop. Bishops have faculties by being bishops. Now, the safe environment thing is another question but again, it is a logical problem for a subordinate to vouch for his boss.
It is the same reason a Head of State does not need a passport. A passport is basically the head of state asking that the individual identified be given every courtesy and protection. The head of state can just ask that himself.
(There is a story locally about when Queen Elizabeth II came to Kentucky on a private visit to see some horse breeders. She landed directly at Lexington (or maybe Louisville) airport, and customs asked for her passport. There was a delay to convince the agent that as head of state, she did not need a passport.)
There is already a federated, distributed database: in the various chanceries and parishes. The problem with creating a central database is that you now have to keep the two in sync. That will always be more costly than continuing to keep the existing one up to date with *reality* (the original database).
What flabbergasts me is the use of US Mail for the transactions (query and response). The low-cost next step is to use email whenever possible. The only friction reduction the conference could provide would be to standardize the mailbox names for inquiries: "priest.status@...diocese.org", etc. Signed and encrypted email is widely available and should be used for this application.
I'm grateful to The Pillar for doing the hard work to minimise the tortiousness of this subject matter.
Mail? They don’t even fax the information over? Faxes are actually more secure than e-mail or snail mail and as far as I know, faxes are unhackable too. Fax machines seem to be making a bit of a comeback.
That seems like common sense to have a data base. It would make things much smoother than having to call the chancery and have them fax things. It is a combersome process.
> “ It is easy to imagine situations in which a priest’s status changed — his faculties were suspended or he was temporarily prohibited from ministry — and the database not updated. And it is easy to think of the potential implications of that situation.”
How is that different from the diocesan directory being on the website but outdated? Seems like a “last updated/confirmed” entry is as good as where we’re at.
What I really want to know is *who* is being deceptive: the activist, semi-disgraced-kicked-out-of-his-religious-order priest who claims to be incardinated in a particular diocese or said diocese which has never publicly listed him in their directory? Fr. Joh Dear and Diocese of Monterey I’m looking at you. It would be nice to have a place to confirm such claims that was basically authoritative.
"What I really want to know is *who* is being deceptive"
-I thought you were talking about Rupnik until the end.
I have started to call this problem of adequate participation in entering accurate data "the Salesforce effect," as an organizational problem for many is trying to get corporate business development teams to modify existing processes that depend on email/zoom/notebooks/phone calls to depend mainly on a "single source of truth" from a data collection perspective. In some environments, the incentive can come naturally, but sometimes the process needs to change in a way that folks who are "letters of good standing generators" just don't cooperate with.
From a civil liability standpoint, that impact can vary depending on the organization that staff member is a part of (i.e. compare an administrator for the USCCB against a secretary at a parish whose civil biz org in the Catholic Diocese of Wilmington is organized under a non-profit Delaware LLC). The threat of civil liability can potentially incentivize staff members to "get it right" and use the single source of data truth; but in the distant wake of Spotlight/McCarrick, how much more cash can dioceses and parishes afford to lose just to learn a lesson about effective digital implementation of safe environment guidelines?
I have been working out in my mind how to make a secure app that would enable anyone to verify a cleric's ministry status. The security would be relatively easy.
Then it dawned on me that this is likely not what Bishops want. To get a letter of suitability requires a form to someone in the chancery with all the details, and the letter of suitability is then sent to the other diocese. In other words, the chancery (Bishop) knows exactly when a priest is away, what he is doing, and where he is.
I think that is seen as a positive.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, because this level of control and surveillance (if you want to view it cynically) actually lets a lot slip through the cracks from an actual security and quality control perspective. I am wary of centralization (what if the database were hacked, what if a nefarious actor gained access, etc) but it’s clear that the decentralized system has its flaws too.
When I entered the seminary, I went to get my baptismal certificate. There were no notations whatsoever, as the secretary said "the pastor says its only important to record marriages." That being said, I had to go do the legwork to get proof of my other sacraments from the parish I did them at.
Years later, I ended up getting married. Obviously, I needed another copy of my baptismal certificate, which still didn't note my First Communion or Confirmation. Only this time, the new administrator charged me $20 for an incomplete record.
That being said, multply these inconsistencies by however many parishes exist in this world. My wife is a parish secretary. A very transient, immigrant population made up the last parish she worked at. She told me several times how difficult it was to send any type of sacramental records (let alone receive confirmation of annotations to records) to distant places that didn't have even fax or reliable mail services.
As someone professionally engaged in information technology, I'm going to come at this from a different angle:
"The technology is the simplest part of an initiative like that, and a platform could likely be programmed by a capable expert in a matter of hours." -JD Flynn
Respectfully, no. Simplest, maybe, but not simple. Just making the platform takes physical resources to run the thing, and intellectual resources to design, implement, and maintain it. To do it right is expensive and time consuming, regardless of whether it's done directly by the USCCB or outsourced. Doing it wrong sets up the next data breach headline.
If Brazil gets it done, great.
Oh! THank you! That's not what I've been told by others, but I am glad to stand corrected!
I could very well be more pessimistic than warranted. Without completely doxxing myself, my experience is limited and there is a variety of opinion in IT, just like any other field.
But I would be shocked if some centralized system like Brazil's cost less than 8 figures, just to set up.
That is very many figures.
I think there are ways to design for these problems especially regarding suitability.
For the centralization/liability problem, have the system be federated instead of centralized. Kind of like email: Gmail and AOL both have their own email systems and software, run on their own servers, but users of one system can send emails to users of the other system without a problem. Maybe some dioceses implement the same information system from a certain company, other dioceses develop their own, but since they're based on the same standards these different systems can still communicate with each other, and if a diocese doesn't have the means (or desire) to keep such a system updated, they just keep doing things the way we're doing them now.
Possible example: Fr. Bob of Diocese A is celebrating a wedding in Diocese B. He logs into Diocese A's system and requests a letter of suitability be sent to Diocese B's system. Diocese A's Vicar for Clergy's office manually confirm the request and a digital certificate of suitability is sent to Diocese B's system, with an expiration date set by Diocese A (e.g. 30 days). Diocese A assumes the responsibility to keep this record updated until the expiration date.
Diocese B receives the certificate of suitability and if needed can "refresh" the certificate the day of the wedding to make sure Fr Bob is still in good standing. Diocese B's system asks Diocese A's system if there have been any changes and because Diocese A has promised to keep this record updated, Diocese A's system can respond to this request automatically. Once the certificate expires, Diocese B refreshing the certificate will result in a new request being sent to Diocese A for manual confirmation, and if Diocese A in the meantime has decided to stop using this system and go back to paper, Diocese B won't be sitting there with outdated information and Diocese A won't be liable for records it didn't agree to keep updated.
If Diocese C also wants to check Fr Bob's suitability, they won't be able to until Diocese A's Vicar for Clergy's office manually approves the request and issues a certificate with an expiration date to Diocese C. This ensures Diocese A is opting-in to the responsibility of keeping this record updated and has a record of all the places Fr Bob is ministering.
Maybe Diocese B wants a more automated system: they can develop a system where they promise their records will always be updated immediately. Diocese C requests a certificate of suitability from Diocese B's system. Diocese B's system automatically responds with a certificate with like a 1 hour expiration and logs the diocese that requested it.
Because these systems are federated and not centralized, they can communicate with one another but every diocese can set the parameters so their own system behaves as they need it to, and no diocese needs to implement a system if they don't have the means or desire to do so.
If the diocese wants to make portions of this open to the public, that's something they can opt into. Alice can look up Fr Bob's status on Diocese A's system and it gives his status along with the last time it was updated. Diocese A commits to updating its public records once a month. If this particular record hasn't been manually confirmed in over a month, it gives an error instead of giving stale information. If Diocese B doesn't want to take on that responsibility of keeping public records updated, they don't have to.
I imagine the biggest opponents of such a system are actually all of the companies that already store and profit from American Catholic data. Almost every diocese and parish in the country has subscriptions to at least one of:
- Parish Data Systems (ACS)
- Ministry Platform (ACS)
- eCatholic
- Camino
- Pushpay
- OSV Manager
- Teclesia
- ParishSOFT
and so on…
Data on American Catholic clergy, parishes, and parishioners is easily a multi-million dollar cottage industry. Those are probably the same groups most interested in not “nationalizing“ clergy and sacramental data.