The Smoke of Satan: How Corrupt and Cowardly Bishops Betrayed Christ, His Church, and the Faithful . . . and What Can Be Done About It

week.

CHAPTER 1

The Smoke of Satan

In Jerusalem, just outside the walled Old City, stands the church of St. Peter in Gallicantu: St. Peter as the Cock Crows. Catholic churches are regularly dedicated to saints, but only rarely to a particular moment in a saint’s life. Then again, this is no ordinary saint, no ordinary moment.

St. Peter in Gallicantu was built in the fifth century, and rebuilt by Crusaders, on the spot traditionally thought to have been the site where Caiaphas the high priest lived, where Jesus was brought to stand trial. In the courtyard of that house, Peter three times denied that he was a follower of Christ. The Gospel of Luke (22:60–62) recounts the incident: And immediately, while he was still speaking, the cock crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how he had said to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times.’ And he went out and wept bitterly.

In his tears—in his repentance, his willingness to throw himself on Christ’s mercy—Peter found redemption. The first pope, the acknowledged hero and leader of the early Christian community, was, and knew himself to be, a flawed man.

Nor was Peter the only one of Christ’s followers to desert him in his time of trial. Of the twelve apostles, the Gospel accounts put only John at the foot of the Cross, keeping vigil with Jesus; the others were not on the scene. Of course, John was not alone. With him was Mary, the Mother of Jesus, who, unlike the apostles, was not flawed and never deserted her Son.

The Church on earth, the Second Vatican Council proclaimed, is endowed already with a sanctity that is real though imperfect (Lumen Gentium 48). The Catechism of the Catholic Church, after quoting that sentence, continues, In her members perfect holiness is something yet to be acquired (825).

When the cock crowed, Peter painfully recognized his sinfulness, his need to acquire holiness: a need that he felt through the day of his martyrdom. For Mary—who, the Church teaches, was born without stain of sin—holiness was and is a constant. In that respect, Mary is a model of the Church: always faithful, the spotless Bride of Christ. But Peter and the apostles are also a model of the Church: the hierarchical institution, founded by Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, yet confided into the care of fallen men.

For Catholics, it is always a challenge to keep these two models of the Church in proper perspective. The mystical, Marian model, without the practical guidance of the teaching hierarchy, can veer off into emotionalism and amorphous sentimentality. The Petrine model, stripped of the Marian warmth, can become cold and calculating. In The Beauty of Holiness and the Holiness of Beauty, John Saward writes, Detached from Mary, the Church is no longer seen as a person, a woman, Christ’s bride, and our mother, but as an organization, a conspiracy of interfering clergymen. And, one might add, that is, in fact, what it becomes.

The faithful Catholic should recognize Christ’s Church in both models, Marian and Petrine. Toward the Marian Church the appropriate attitude is a childlike trust and devotion. Toward the Petrine Church, a mature adult’s confidence.

But what happens when the members of the hierarchy, the leaders of the Petrine Church, lose our confidence? It can happen; they are ordinary humans with ordinary weaknesses. And often they face the extraordinary temptation to substitute their own judgment for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When St. Peter voiced his own personal opinion that Jesus should not be given up to death, the Lord rebuked him severely: Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men (Mt 16:23).

The history of the Catholic Church is a history marked by success and failure, by sanctity and by sin, by splendor and by corruption. This of course is the history of the visible Church, the hierarchical model; through it all, the Marian Church remains pure and loyal. In good times and bad, the sacraments are administered, the Eucharist is celebrated; Christ is with his Church, offering salvation. The invisible work of the Church is always the first priority. Frank Sheed remarked in Christ in Eclipse, We are not baptized into the hierarchy, do not receive the cardinals sacramentally, will not spend eternity in the beatific vision of the Pope. … Christ is the point.

Still, it is wrong to dismiss the importance of the hierarchy. Jesus promised that the Holy Spirit would guide the Church always, that despite the manifest weaknesses of her leaders, the Church would prevail over the gates of hell. Popes and bishops have made innumerable errors of judgment over the course of generations, yet the Church still survives, the faith still spreads, while other once-powerful human institutions wither and die. The very fact that the Church has weathered all storms, regardless of the helmsmen’s errors, is in itself evidence of the Spirit’s power. As Hilaire Belloc famously quipped, the Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine—but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

Knavish imbecility: those are harsh words. But in 2018, loyal Catholics are using that sort of language, and worse, to describe the shocking malfeasance of bishops, especially in response to the sex-abuse scandal. Our bishops have betrayed our trust; a deep and pervasive corruption within the hierarchy has been exposed. As a chastened Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami observed in a September homily, Our people still do believe in God; but they don’t believe in us.¹

How did our bishops lose the confidence of the faithful, and how can the profound damage to the Church be repaired? This book is written in an effort to answer those questions.

On one level, the first question can be answered quite simply. The bishops lost our confidence because, as a group, they were—and were shown to be—dishonest. They covered up evidence of sexual abuse and misled the public with claims that the problem had been resolved. Still worse, their dishonesty continued even after their negligence had been painfully, thoroughly exposed. Even conscientious bishops, whose own conduct and leadership were beyond reproach, contributed to the overall problem by failing to denounce those who were flagrantly corrupt and dishonest. The same sort of cover-ups that shocked the faithful when they were brought to light in 2002 were unearthed once again in 2018, and this time, the faithful, having been assured that the bishops had learned their lessons, were outraged to learn that the deceit had continued.

Somehow bishops had become convinced that by suppressing the truth about clerical misconduct, they were serving the Church. Obviously, something had gone terribly wrong with their understanding of the Church they served; the Marian model was missing. Can anyone imagine the Virgin Mary telling lies? Tolerating the abuse of children? Allowing predators to serve on the altar, performing sacred rites? Certainly not; the mere suggestion is repugnant.

Why, then, did our bishops and other Church leaders not instantly recognize the grave moral wrong that was done when they failed to do all in their power to expose, punish, and prevent abuse? That tolerance for evil was, alas, not an isolated phenomenon. The second outcropping of the scandal, in 2018, showed that the same ugly attitudes were the norm rather than the exception across hundreds of dioceses and dozens of countries, and even at the Vatican. Nor was this a problem that arose under Pope Francis; the historical evidence stretched back for decades, tarring the records of his predecessors.

This habit of dishonesty, I will argue, has been built up in the Catholic hierarchy through years of avoiding conflicts, managing the control of information, and preserving appearances—all motivated by a powerful desire to avoid confronting some fundamental problems. To preserve a façade of unity, bishops have deliberately ignored deep divisions among the faithful: divisions on matters of theological doctrine, moral practice, and canonical discipline. As a result of this negligence, over the years Catholic doctrine has become blurred, moral practice lax, and discipline within the ranks virtually non-existent.

Back in 1972, on the ninth anniversary of his installation as Roman pontiff, Pope Paul VI recognized the problems that had sprung up throughout the universal Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council: the rising tide of profanity, of desacralization, of secularization that wants to confuse and overwhelm the religious sense in the secret of the heart, in private life, or even in the affirmations of public life. These ills were not coming exclusively from outside the Church; Pope Paul warned, Through some fissure the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God. He spoke of something preternatural that has come into the world precisely to disturb, to suffocate the fruits of the ecumenical council.²

In that sobering statement, Pope Paul acknowledged that the Church in the late twentieth century faced a rising tide of secularization. But he saw a more sinister threat as well: a diabolical assault on the integrity of the Faith. Is it unreasonable to think of the sex-abuse scandal as a show of the devil’s success? Could there be any more effective way to undermine the authority of the Church than to show that priests had molested children and bishops had allowed the abuse to continue unchecked?

Pope Paul’s evocative image of the smoke of Satan also suggested that the atmosphere within the Church had been tainted, that vision had been obscured, so that pastors no longer saw issues clearly. And sad to say, although he acknowledged the danger, Pope Paul was unable to avert it. The secular tide kept rising, while the divisions within the Catholic community grew wider.

***

Our enemy today is the world: the spirit of the world, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, the great Catholic evangelist, said in a memorable television address in 1974. He went on to recall that ten or twenty years earlier, it had been much easier to live a Christian life in America: The atmosphere was Christian; morals were Christian; there was not a great problem in adapting ourselves to a Christian society. But now, when everything is turned around, these are days when the masks have come off, and we reveal ourselves just as we really are.³

And what are we, really? Have we, as Catholic Christians, preserved our faith, our way of life, in an increasingly secular culture? Or has the culture sapped the evangelical energy of the Church? The Second Vatican Council was convened by Pope John XXIII to provide guidance on how the Church could meet the challenges of a secular culture. In that regard, at least, the promise of the council has clearly been unfulfilled.

What were the fruits of the ecumenical council, which Pope Paul saw endangered? Some theologians and commentators, on the progressive wing of the Church, welcomed Vatican II as a sharp break with Catholic tradition, an invitation to an entirely new approach to the Faith. Others, more conservative (and more faithful to the actual documents produced by the council), saw it as a re-affirmation of traditional teachings, combined with a new pastoral approach. Still others, on the traditionalist wing, agreed with the progressives that the council had been a radical break, but lamented it.

Pope John Paul II, who had been an influential participant in the council deliberations, sought to reconcile the opposing factions, but with limited success. Pope Benedict XVI, the greatest Catholic theologian of his generation, taught that the work of Vatican II must be interpreted using a hermeneutic of continuity so that the council’s documents were read in the perspective of the Church’s constant teaching. But while these two great pontiffs gave the Church a rich treasury of teaching, they could not root out the disagreements among the faithful. The divisions within the Church remained; the arguments over fundamental beliefs raged on.

To avoid bitter clashes, Church leaders—including those two popes—did their best to downplay the differences among the faithful, to paper over the divisions. So when theologians at Catholic universities denied what the popes affirmed, they were rarely corrected. When priests violated liturgical norms, they were rarely rebuked. Mass attendance plummeted, priests and religious by the thousands abandoned their vocations, parochial schools closed, and yet Church leaders avoided expressions of urgency and crisis.

To advance through the ranks of the hierarchy in the late twentieth century, clerics were expected to suppress problems rather than confront them, to soothe the faithful rather than rouse them, to conceal problems rather than admit them. In that atmosphere, when bishops learned that priests had molested young men, they did their best to manage the issue, to keep things running smoothly, above all to avoid calling public attention to the problem. So the abuse continued—just as the theological dissent and the liturgical abuse continued. But finally, as almost always happens, the cover-up failed; the truth of the abuse scandal emerged. Now that the evidence that was suppressed for decades has exploded into public view, the bishops’ neglect—likely too benign a word—is unmistakable.

If the fundamental problem facing the Church is dishonesty—a habit of deliberate ambiguity, a failure to grapple with hard truths—then the solution must be a candid, unapologetic return to the truth: not only in addressing and dealing with the shocking details of clerical abuse, but also in the proclamation of the truths of the Catholic faith. And if the bishops have lost their instinct for that forthright evangelical approach, then it falls upon lay Catholics—in this era, proclaimed by Vatican II as the age of the laity—to demand the truth and reclaim the Catholic tradition.

CHAPTER 2

The Summer of 2018

Every five hundred years, it seems, Christianity faces some historic crisis that changes the face of the Church: the fall of the Roman Empire, the Great Schism, the Protestant Reformation. The crisis that is upon us now, the clash between faith and materialism, has been building for decades, and its final outcome is uncertain. But when historians write about the great cultural contest of the twenty-first century, they might well say that the crisis peaked in the United States during the summer of 2018.

The year began quietly enough. In January, when Pope Francis delivered the traditional papal State of the World address to the Vatican diplomatic corps, the pontiff spoke about the environment, immigration, and human rights. In Rome, the liveliest theological debates still revolved around Amoris Laetitia, the controversial document on marriage that Pope Francis had released nearly two full years earlier. There were rumors that the Vatican might soon strike a deal with the government of China, allowing the Communist regime a say in the appointment of bishops. (The aging Cardinal Joseph Zen, retired archbishop of Hong Kong, stood quietly in the cold rain during a January papal audience, waiting for a chance to present the pope with a petition begging him to reconsider any such deal with Beijing.) Vatican journalists scarcely mentioned the sex-abuse problem.

But January 2018 also brought a papal visit to Chile, where the stage was set for a searing drama. The Catholic community in Chile had been stunned in 2015 when the pope appointed Bishop Juan Barros to head the Osorno diocese. Bishop Barros had been closely associated with Father Fernando Karadima, a once phenomenally popular priest in Chile who, it was