This has been a tough year for the US Church. The abuse crisis has once again dominated the headlines. The year began with the dismissal from the clerical state of the notorious former Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, Theodore McCarrick, and ended with the long-awaited resignation of Bishop Richard Malone over his handling of abuse cases in Buffalo.
Bishop Malone’s departure was connected to another theme of this year: the several investigations by state attorneys general into abuse cases stretching back decades. Several of these probes began in 2018, but the results of a handful of them made big headlines this year: in Pennsylvania, Missouri, Colorado, New York and California.
In Texas, a raid on the chancery of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, then president of the US bishops’ conference (USCCB), was followed by another in Dallas in May. The Diocese of Rochester, meanwhile, is filing for bankruptcy and Buffalo is facing hundreds of lawsuits.
In June the bishops settled on a new procedure involving (but not mandating) lay involvement in reporting abuse by bishops. It stipulates that “each metropolitan [archbishop], in consultation with the suffragan bishops, should appoint on a stable basis, even by means of an ecclesiastical office, a qualified lay person to receive reports of conduct about bishops.”
It will be up to the new president of the USCCB, Archbishop José Gómez of Los Angeles, to see to it that the protocols are implemented. Gómez, who was elected in November, will be the first Hispanic head of the USCCB. He is also known for his passionate advocacy for the rights of migrants, and for his long association with Opus Dei.
Secular investigations even affected seemingly unrelated matters such as the beatification of the pioneering communicator Fulton Sheen. The beatification ceremony, planned for this month, was cancelled at the last-minute after the Bishop of Rochester expressed concern that New York’s attorney general might accuse Sheen of mishandling a clerical abuser while overseeing Rochester diocese in the 1960s.
The McCarrick scandal in particular hung like a pall over the year’s Catholic news. In April, the new Archbishop of Washington, Wilton Gregory, was appointed following the resignation late last year of his predecessor Cardinal Donald Wuerl, who had been caught in the middle of both the McCarrick affair and cases in Pittsburgh cited in Pennsylvania’s devastating grand jury report.
The disgraced McCarrick, meanwhile, did not remain silent, coming to the door to speak to a Slate reporter over the summer for an interview published in September. McCarrick defended the Vatican against charges by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, former nuncio to the US, that it had been warned about McCarrick’s predations.
“He was talking as a representative of the far right, I think,” McCarrick told Ruth Graham. “I don’t want to say he’s a liar, but I think some of the bishops have said that he was not telling the truth.”
Readers must decide for themselves whether he is a persuasive source to exonerate the Vatican, which promised months ago to issue a report on the McCarrick case, but had not done so as we went to press.
Demographically speaking, the news in 2019 wasn’t much better. Two polls from Pew suggested that Catholics by and large don’t know their religion and many are leaving it entirely. A religious literacy survey found that only 28 per cent of Catholics know what the Church teaches about transubstantiation and believe it, and 69 per cent think the Eucharist is merely symbolic (43 per cent of US Catholic think this is what the Church teaches too). A second survey found that the Catholic population has dwindled in the past 12 years from about a fourth of the American population to a fifth.
The latter months of 2019 were also marked by acts of arson against Catholic churches, though nothing nearly as serious as that experienced in France. There were three in May and June in El Paso and one this month in New Jersey.
In happier news, this summer the second miracle attributable to the intercession of St John Henry Newman was confirmed, and he was canonised in Rome in October. The miracle occurred in 2013 to Melissa Villalobos, who was experiencing a haemorrhage during a difficult pregnancy.
Newman looms large in the US, where he is best known for the university Catholic centres that bear his name. But he also played a role in the conversion of several prominent 19th-century American Anglo-Catholics, among them Alfred Curtis, who was confirmed by Newman in 1872 and later became an auxiliary bishop of Baltimore.
While 2019 has seen the fall of some of the worst figures in the clerical abuse scandals, it remains likely that there are other shoes to drop in 2020.
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