What happens when bishops call the USCCB ‘duplicitous’?

Three archbishops have made direct criticism of the conference's senior staff - now what?

One month after the U.S. bishops met in plenary assembly, and three months after the resignation of its former director, the Catholic Campaign for Human Development’s budget cuts continue to spark conflict and controversy among conference members and staff.

Archbishop Christopher Coyne of Hartford, Fr. Michael Fuller, secretary general of the USCCB

Last week, several bishops voiced their opposition to the loss of several staff positions connected to the USCCB’s department for Justice, Peace, and Human Development in the wake of a financial crisis triggered by years of overspending at its flagship programme.

Several bishops have complained that conference members — bishops — had not been consulted or even notified about the pending layoffs, despite a letter from the USCCB’s secretary general, Fr. Michael Fuller, saying that staff reductions had been discussed in executive session during the bishops’ June meeting, albeit not in detail.

The strength of feeling expressed by some of the bishops would seem to take the matter beyond a simple miscommunication. 

Whatever the conference may choose to do as it mulls further reforms to its justice and peace department, the standoff between some of its members and the USCCB leadership would seem to require some kind of resolution.

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When the bishops discussed in a closed-door session the fate of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development last month in Louisville, they did so in the context of a serious budget crisis. 

The Pillar has reported that year-on-year funding for the CCHD had been in decline for some time. Meanwhile the program continued to make generous grant allocations in excess of its income, depleting its cash reserves in the process. 

To meet outstanding but otherwise unfunded CCHD grant commitments, three out of six of the USCCB justice department’s personnel designated for CCHD were laid off this summer, along with an additional four of the 17 other positions in the justice and peace secretariat.

The changes were confirmed in a letter to all bishops from the conference secretary general, Fr. Michael Fuller on June 28. Two other administrative staffers at the conference were also laid off, Fuller explained in his letter, and other vacant positions are expected to go unfilled to make further savings.

Fuller, who has been general secretary of the conference since 2021, said in his letter that he had told bishops layoffs would be coming.

“As I shared with you at the Plenary Assembly, we are restructuring and reducing staff in several departments that were partly funded by the CCHD [annual collection],” Fuller wrote. 

“Because of the nature of these changes, and the fact that they deal with personnel issues, I was unable to share more specifics during the Assembly.”

Exactly what Fr. Fuller was able to share with the bishops in Louisville is not known, since the discussion took place in closed executive session. But several senior prelates have since challenged the assertion that staff cuts had been discussed at all.

Last week, Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski of St. Louis appeared to challenge directly Fr. Fuller’s letter, telling the National Catholic Reporter last week that “these planned staff cuts were not even mentioned at our meeting in Louisville.”

Archbishop Christopher Coyne of Hartford made a similar claim to the Reporter, saying that “At no point was any discussion made or talked about in terms of significant employee cuts.”

“It comes across as being somewhat duplicitous in terms of what was actually discussed with us as bishops and what actually happened,” Coyne said.

Las Vegas Archbishop George Thomas also went on record to dispute Fuller’s version of events, saying that “the cutbacks at USCCB caught me off guard,” and that he “was surprised and disappointed by the lack of meaningful process leading up to these changes.”

There is, perhaps, a reasonable gray area for disagreement about how much detail Fr. Fuller was able to offer with the bishops in Louisville, before individual staff were notified of their layoffs. 

But three archbishops have by now effectively accused the conference’s most senior official of “duplicity,” and outright denied that any mention of staff cuts was made — all suggesting that they believe Fuller’s letter was a lie.

That would seem to raise a pressing question of credibility for the conference leadership vis a vis its members, or directly impugn the integrity of the general secretary.

If Fr. Fuller did not, in fact, explicitly mention conference staffing cuts in relation to the CCHD budget crisis — as he has stated he did — then it would seem to represent something of a crisis for the conference, given that the priest would have misrepresented himself directly to the entire body of the U.S. episcopate, for whom he works.

On the other hand, if the executive session did include direct discussion of impending staff cuts, Archbishops Rozanski, Coyne, and Thomas would appear to have very publicly brought Fr. Fuller’s credibility and good faith into question without cause.

Finding a resolution should be relatively straightforward. While executive sessions of the conference’s assemblies are closed to the public, minutes are still kept, albeit in an anonymized manner. 

While exact records of who-said-what are not kept by the conference, a record of the discussions is maintained, and usually made available to the bishops some months later. 

Establishing whether the conference was briefed by Fuller about impending staff cuts should be fairly easy — indeed he probably delivered a prepared text which could be consulted — and any record of that point being discussed from the floor would be more than sufficient to answer the assertions raised by the three archbishops.

If the archbishops are correct, it would place a serious question mark over Fuller credibility with the bishops. 

Of course, it is possible — arguably more likely — that Archbishops Rozanski, Coyne, and Thomas are mistaken but sincere in their recollections of the plenary assembly. Individual episcopal attention is known to wander during conference meetings, especially during more extended sessions. 

It could be that the three archbishops simply did not catch the relevant parts of Fr. Fuller’s presentation. In that case a simple, a straightforward apology to the general secretary would likely quell something that could become a far more significant issue otherwise.

But if the official record is unable to substantiate very public criticism of the conference’s senior official from three archbishops, observers might conclude that Fr. Fuller has been unfairly vilified for implementing the unpopular consequences of a financial mess at the conference, and left without any obvious means of responding.

Given conference protocol, it would seem out of the question for Fuller to authorize the release of minutes of executive session, nor would it be likely that he would take issue publicly with several archbishops.

But assuming Fuller has been unfairly maligned, that kind of targeting of conference staff would seem to call for some kind of clarification from the conference’s episcopal leadership, most likely the executive committee. 

If that doesn’t happen, it would leave some observers with the impression that conference officials are fair game for public criticism by bishops, with obvious consequences for recruitment, morale among staff, and, potentially, the effectiveness of staffers at a time when they are already being asked to do more with less.