What is the ‘Dallas Charter’ for, exactly?
Is it about preventing abuse in the future, or just a monument to scandals of the past?
The bishops of the United States are set to vote this week on updates to the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, known as the “Dallas Charter.”
During their spring assembly in Florida this week, the bishops will consider a slate of changes to the document, first issued in 2002 and last updated in 2018, in the last days before the McCarrick scandal broke across the Church in the United States, kicking off a new wave of reckoning with historical allegations of abuse and episcopal negligence.
Since then, the Church has entered a new era of canonical processes, following the 2019 promulgation of Vos estis lux mundi by Pope Francis. Alongside this, a steady stream of investigations and reports from states’ attorneys general have led to state level legislation creating look-back windows, clearing the way for generations of litigations, and leading to enormous financial settlements and diocesan bankruptcies.
Set within this context, many had anticipated that the next iteration of charter reform would reflect, and reflect on, the seismic changes the Church in the U.S. has undergone in the last eight years.
It remains to be seen how the bishops will vote on the text and what, if any, conversation the proposals will generate during the conference this week.
But with USCCB leadership likely to back strongly its adoption as-is, and some already calling the update process a “missed opportunity,” the question may become what the Dallas Charter actually is, and is for, in the Church in the United States.
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It is worth acknowledging from the outset that “modest change” is not “no change,” exactly.
This has not materialized in the proposals up for a vote in Orlando this week.
However, the bishops are being offered a draft text which does at least acknowledge the existence of new canonical legislation regarding the bishops themselves, like Vos estis, and address concerns that have emerged in recent years over the due process rights of accused clerics — albeit in somewhat cursory fashion.
However, the revised Charter also goes out of its way to emphasize and underline the limit of its scope — clerical sexual abuse of minors.
Despite the near-decade of debate and canonical reform around the abuse of “vulnerable adults” — an issue highlighted by the McCarrick scandal — the revised Charter text insists that “instances of clerical sexual misconduct involving adults are … not within the scope of this Charter.”
It was exactly that limitation which seemed to inspired the detailed proposal from Archbishop Shawn McKnight last year, which suggested a new set of commitments from the bishops which could grow beyond the Charter’s original scope, while building on its successes.
And the limitation is not a manner of canon law or any external limitation. The Charter is not a legal document; it’s a kind of moral agreement between bishops, which could encompass whatever they would choose to include within it.
Still, the conference’s proposed text appears to embrace the very limitations which many have said shows the need for evolutionary thinking from the bishops, and for many observers this will be seen as ultimately self-defeating.
The updated Charter opens by echoing Pope Leo XIV’s call “to root in the whole Church a culture of prevention that does not tolerate any form of abuse—neither of power or authority, nor abuse of conscience, spiritual or sexual abuse.”
Yet for many canonists and victims’ advocates, this culture necessarily understands that cultures of prevention and abuse are both necessarily holistic, for good or bad.
Abuse of power and conscience, spirituality and sexuality, does not occur in isolated silos or in neatly defined legal categories. On the contrary, as the McCarrick scandal laid bare, all these iterations of abuse tend to be mutually present, overlapping, and reinforcing. The laicized former cardinal was accused of abuse of minors and adults, including seminarians, and of using his power, both within the Church hierarchically and spiritually to deflect scrutiny and continue abusing over years.
Similarly, the lessons of the last quarter of a century seem to show that a “climate of prevention” cannot be narrowly cultivated, but has to be fostered — and when necessary enforced — across the whole of ecclesiastical society.
The sense of many experts reading the changes is that the revised text being offered to bishops acknowledges how the Church’s engagement with the abuse crisis has broadened over the years, and deepened in its response, while keeping the Charter itself as narrow as possible.
That seemingly self-conscious narrowness is further reflected in texts acknowledgement of concerns over the handling of accusations as they relate to accused clerics.
“The revision also attempts to balance its care of and sensitivity to victim-survivors, with an awareness of due process, [and] the rights of the accused,” Bishop Barry Knestout, USCCB safeguarding committee chairman, wrote to members of the conference presenting the proposed update.
However, the extent to which the new text makes any new commitments on the bishops’ behalf to accused clerics who are not found guilty seems very limited. While the current text and proposed revisions acknowledge the presumption of innocence for accused clerics and their right to legal representation — civil and canonical — the extent to which they can mount a legal defence or defend their rights to due process remains highly discretionary across dioceses.
The new text does include enhanced language, and therefore a theoretically more robust moral commitment from the bishops, to protect accused clerics’ good name during an investigation and to restore their reputations and ministries in the event an allegation is not proven.
However, the primary means by which the reputations of clerics is indelibly harmed — and often a key hurdle to their return to ministry — is when diocesan review boards (whose existence and function is mandated by the Charter) use legally prejudicial language like “credible” and “substantiated” to describe unproven and legally untried accusations at the earliest stages of consideration.
Rome has been similarly and repetitively blunt about the common practice of U.S. dioceses publishing and maintaining lists of “credibly accused” clerics, despite the accusation not having been litigated nor the accused clerics afforded the chance to defend themselves.
None of these practices or terms are mentioned in the revised Charter which, given the Vatican’s repeated warnings to American bishops, will likely strike many in Rome as a glaring — even defiant — omission.
In fact, perhaps tellingly, the closest the new text comes to those concerns is it proposes to remove the single use word “substantiated” from itself.
But perhaps the most telling aspect of the Charter renewal process is what it does not propose: any changes to the Essential Norms, the complimentary text approved by the bishops alongside the charter and adopted not as a moral commitment but as operative canon law in every diocese in the country.
The decision not to link an update to the Charter with and update to the particular law of the country will strike many as indicative of a desire to acknowledge with words how the world has changed in the last 25 years, but without actually changing in a practical way how the U.S. bishops handle issues of abuse at a canonical procedural level.
The necessary question from there is, of course, why? And there are no clear answers, as yet.
Indeed, despite the revised text agreeing with Pope Leo that a culture of abuse prevention “will only be authentic if it is born of active vigilance, of transparent processes and sincere listening to those who have been hurt,” it remains to be seen how transparent the conference leadership will be with its members, to say nothing of American Catholics, about the thinking behind the revised text.
It could be the case that this week in Orlando will see significant time and freedom given to the bishops to discuss the Charter, and to hear a full and frank explanation of the proposals — the conversation could be in public, if the conference wished it to be, though it seems more likely destined for executive session, if it happens at all.
It seems equally if not more likely that the bishops will be quietly encouraged to vote through the updates with minimal discussion after hearing a brief account of the changes.
If that happens, many looking in from the outside will wonder what the point of the Charter really is in the post-McCarrick Church in the U.S., if the bishops’ collective moral commitment on abuse seems itself committed to acknowledging what has changed while engaging with the changes as lightly as possible.
Of course, one possible explanation for the very minimal updates to the Charter is simply legal advice.
It could be that among all lessons learned in the near quarter century since its adoption, the most practical is how the Charter relates to the messy and painful business of lawsuits, compensation, and institutional liability. It is entirely possible that the bishops have been told it is simply too risky, from a legal perspective, to change too much of the Charter, lest it open new lines of liability alongside new efforts at accountability.
Whatever the real reason behind the very modest proposed changes, absent a transparent argument to the contrary, many will make the assumption that, 25 years on, the Dallas Charter has ceased to be a prophetic commitment to preventing abuse in the future and instead become a willfully ossified monument to scandals of the past.
"The Charter is not a legal document; it’s a kind of moral agreement between bishops, which could encompass whatever they would choose to include within it."
-The Charter is more like "guidelines" than actual "rules".