McCarrick Report: Call to reform Catholic priest selection

The Rev. Phillip J. Brown
Nov. 20, 2020
The Columbus Dispatch

The McCarrick Report investigating sexual abuse by disgraced former Washington, D.C., cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick, released this month by the Vatican, catalogs facts that cannot be ignored, denied or explained away.

The harm inflicted by McCarrick over decades is a source of deep remorse and shame for the Catholic Church. Like most, I am bewildered that he was able to advance in the ranks while preying on victims even while serious accusations about him were known or credibly rumored.

Before priesthood, I served as assistant attorney general for Pardons, Parole and Probation in North Dakota. I reviewed the files of every inmate in the corrections system, which included every kind of sex crime. Later I served as guardian ad litem for the juvenile court, representing the interests of children, including those who had been sexually abused.

As a priest and canon lawyer, I have been deeply involved in cases of clerical sexual abuse of children and young people. I have had a lifelong commitment to the welfare and well-being of children and young adults — that they be protected from sexual predators especially. That life experience has informed my work as a canonist and now as a seminary official.

The greatest value of the McCarrick Report will be what we learn from it to ensure that nothing like this is able to happen again.

A "pastoral heart" full of good intentions is not enough; there must be a demonstrated capacity to behave in every circumstance as a good pastor and to function as a mature, psychosexually healthy person.

The criteria have to be applied rigorously. Everyone must agree that "looking the other way," waiting for someone else to make the hard calls, claiming "plausible deniability" or naive credulity — all features of the institutional culture revealed in the McCarrick Report — are wholly unacceptable.

Seminaries must shed the veneer of being sacred enclaves that nonclerics are just not able, or qualified, to understand or critique — clerics forming future clerics with no input from others. Laypersons, and especially women, must be an integral part of seminary faculties with prominent roles in the formation and evaluation process. They bring an essential perspective to the closed clerical world with its inevitable blind spots that led to tragedies like the depredations of Theodore McCarrick.

Seminary officials have often had good instincts about suitability without the technical knowledge and other tools we have today for making sound judgments (sophisticated psychological evaluations, holistic developmental models based on sound science, etc.).

Those in positions of authority and officials who serve them need to listen to the people charged with the responsibility of formation and evaluation and follow their recommendations, regardless of pressures to get men ordained and get them into service — service that has too often been marred, if not contradicted, by human immaturity and a lack of virtue in men who should never have been ordained in the first place.

"Many are called, but few are chosen" must be a constant reminder for all those who dare to pursue the Catholic priesthood.

The Rev. Phillip J. Brown is president-rector of Saint Mary's Seminary & University in Baltimore, the United States' first and oldest Catholic seminary. brownpj@stmarys.edu

https://www.dispatch.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/11/20/mccarrick-report-call-reform-catholic-priest-selection/3777145001/