Should 'Vos estis' investigations allow for more outcomes?

It’s worth asking whether 'Vos estis' could be more effective if it led to publicly known consequences beyond removal.

Seven years ago this month, a new set of polices came into effect in the Church, promulgated by Pope Francis and intended to address the problems of both clerical sexual misconduct and episcopal negligence in addressing or assessing allegations of sexual abuse and coercion.

Credit: Andrea Matone / Alamy.

The policies, documented in the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, represented at the time the promise of a new approach to a serious problem, which had come to the fore with the McCarrick scandals of 2018, subsequent grand jury reports, and emerging accounts from Catholics who said they’d manifested concerns to bishops, and been met with silence, or with the appearance of cover-ups.

When it was promulgated, the U.S. bishops’ conference president Cardinal Daniel Dinardo said it would “empower the Church everywhere to bring predators to justice, no matter what rank they hold in the Church. It also permits the Church the time and opportunity to bring spiritual healing.”

Cardinal Sean O’Malley, then leading the pope’s safeguarding commission, said the plan would move the ball in the Church on “disclosure, transparency, and accountability with regard to any occurrence of sexual abuse, or intimidation, or cover up in the life of the Church.”

Transparency has not been a feature of Vos estis’ implementation in the U.S., and because of that, it is nearly impossible to assess whether the goal of internal accountability has been achieved.

But public accountability is easier to assess. With the Vatican and local officials rarely acknowledging Vos estis investigations, and results only being apparent when they lead to resignations — sometimes even made under the guise of “health reasons” —- most observers have concluded that Vos estis investigations have hardly moved the needle on the question of public accountability.

And with a growing number of reports that initial third party reporting systems did not function as intended, or that the Dicastery for Bishops has been slow to respond to reports sent to Rome — most likely from the challenge of chronic understaffing — it’s possible that, in some places, the existence of Vos estis processes have actually diminished public confidence in ecclesial investigation processes, rather than bolstered them.

But some bishops and experts have told The Pillar they see another challenge to a sense of increased public accountability in the administration of Vos estis investigations: the seemingly binary choice given to investigators and ecclesiastical officials engaged in the processes — the sense that a Vatican-ordered investigation will lead either to a solicited resignation, or to no publicly known result at all.

Both bishops and safeguarding experts have told The Pillar that if Vos estis investigations were more publicly acknowledged, with their results and consequences to be publicly known, it would seem more likely that the could Church consider a broader range of end results than resignation, especially if bishops are found to have been in some way negligent in the administration of their duties, but not to the point of necessarily warranting removal.

To be clear, there are certainly cases when removal for mishandling an allegation of abuse or misconduct is demonstrably warranted, and with very little likelihood of objections raised. But there are also cases in which a bishop might have mishandled some element of a case, even badly, without malice, and properly be investigated for it, without it necessarily warranting his removal.

In short, canon law recognizes that in ordinary circumstances, most sanctions and restrictions come by gradation, according to the gravity of the offense or circumstance. It’s plausible to consider that the same is true in cases warranting Vos estis investigations — that while zero tolerance remains appropriately the gold standard for abuse itself, administrative issues may well admit to a graduated scale.

In light of that, it’s worth asking whether Vos estis could be a more effective tool if it led to publicly known consequences beyond removal — both for ensuring better governance from bishops, and for helping to shore up public confidence in the Church’s commitment to safeguarding.

But if so, what might they be?

One option for bishops found to have mishandled some element of a case, especially without malice, might be dubbed the “Hunthausen solution.”

In 1987, because of a track record of doctrinal failures, Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen of Seattle was given a coadjutor bishop with particular competences and faculties, especially surrounding liturgy, priest formulation, and catechesis. In essence, Hunthausen saw the Vatican carve out certain areas of his responsibility, while allowing him to remain diocesan bishop — a prospect foreseen by canon 403 §2 of the Code of Canon Law.

In Hunthausen’s case, it didn’t work, and the coadjutor was gone from the diocese in less than 18 months.

But the Vatican has seen fit to try a similar approach in its own governance: given concerns about his track record and competence in administering disciplinary cases, Cardinal Victor Manuel Fernandez was in 2023 appointed prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, but with only limited involvement and oversight into disciplinary cases, being explicitly exempted (or excluded) from cases involving the abuse of involving minors.

While unusual, that approach seems to have worked in the DDF’s discharge of duties in recent years, and a similar arrangement could be considered for bishops found in the course of a Vos estis investigation to have handled cases incompetently.

There is another option that could be considered, in cases in which some fault has been found, but not sufficient as to suggest removal: public disclosure and public apology.

There are, in the life of the Church today, two practices that exist in considerable tension with one another. The first is the reflexive ecclesial penchant for sequestering information under the highest levels of confidentiality. The second is the bishops’ frequent recourse in recent years to apologies for failures to appropriately handle allegations of abuse.

The challenge with those apologies is that they are generally non-specific expressions of regret, however sincere, for generalized and depersonalized “failings.”

Such apologies can have only limited effect. But Vos estis investigations afford the opportunity for a “paradigm shift,” as it were — for a disclosure of how cases came to be mishandled, and then a genuine apology from the person directly responsible.

Given that option, it could be interesting to see whether some prelates chose resignation instead. But some bishops have proven themselves eager to learn how better to handle cases, and might well welcome the opportunity for a specific and public apology, to the extent it’s called for.

At the same time, it’s worth asking whether Catholics would forgive a bishop who offered apologies for mishandling, in some way, a very serious case. It has been long the fear that a bishop who admits to specific wrongdoing would find himself unable to recover from reputation harm, which is part of the reason there has been no public disclosure when removal is not judged to be warranted.

But there is beginning to be some precedent for an alternative path. While once, any accusation against a priest was regarded as a “death sentence,” today, priests have apologized in some circumstances for failures of prudence or judgment, and been — to some extent — reincorporated into their communities.

Whether that could be possible for bishops who fail to handle cases administratively is hard to predict, but The Pillar has spoken with whistleblowers in some cases who say that acknowledgment of wrongdoing and sincere contrition — with firm purpose of amendment — would do a lot to restore their own trust in their leaders, especially if it was accompanied by a demonstration of plans for local policy or process change.

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Vos estis lux mundi was meant as a creative application of ecclesiastical principles to address an emerging problem — and to effect “a continuous and profound conversion of hearts.” Some of those hearts belong to bishops, and some to Catholics hoping for the Church’s transparent application of justice. For both groups, the use of a broader range of responses, and the necessary disclosure of information that would entail, might well be an effective mechanism.