Vatican Whack-a-Mole

Call it the Vatican Whack-a-Mole. What has been happening in the Catholic Church in France recently, between revelations of clergy sex abuse and the resignation of the archbishop of Paris, says a lot about the opaque system the Vatican uses to name or shame its most important men in the field. 

The Catholic Church in France has been on the decline for a long time now. Sunday Mass attendance is in the mid-single figures, secularism has cut deep into this once very religious society, and governmental laws dating back to a bout of anti-clericalism over a century ago strictly limit the church’s every move. It has to watch what it says and what it does very carefully.

Well, the merde hit the fan this fall when an independent commission, appointed by the Church in 2018 as a sexual abuse scandal boiled over in Lyon, came out early this October with the shocking estimate of about 330,000 cases of abuse against minors since 1950. Two-thirds of them were by priests; the rest were lay Church workers. 

After an ashamed acceptance of the report, the French bishops conference dropped its  “some bad apples” approach to the abuse issue and recognized that the Church itself bore what it called “institutional responsibility.” Their conference agreed to compensate victims on a wide scale, work with civil authorities to fight abuse, and bring more lay people — especially women — into their decision-making.

The church was reeling, but at least responding. Then a center-right newsweekly, Le Point, published a long article criticizing Paris Archbishop Michel Aupetit, the leading religious figure in France. Le Point called him an authoritarian and intolerant loner and it listed several well-known controversies to back that statement up. And, oh, there was also a possible affair with a woman a decade ago to boot. 

It’s the pope’s responsibility to appoint and dismiss bishops, and Francis had named Aupetit to Paris only four years ago. As it turned out, he was not up to the job. Many bishops around the world are also management duds and make their flock grumble. But they haven’t faced the perfect storm that left Aupetit, Pope Francis, and the Vatican bureaucracy grasping at straws.

It began in Lyon back in 2016 with revelations that several successive archbishops had covered up for a serial abusing priest for decades. When this became public, it led to a much-watched movie about the scandal, the civil conviction and then acquittal on appeal of Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, and finally his resignation as archbishop last year.

The commission the bishops agreed to convene in 2018 surprised them by using statistical methods to extrapolate the hard facts it had discovered to cover all of France since 1950. 

That accounts for the 330,000 cases estimate rather than the much lower numbers of actual cases found in similar reports in other countries. The commission argued that the other method undercounts victims since many do not come forward even when asked to participate in such a survey.

Once they accepted this report, it was clear the bishops had months if not years of hard work ahead of them to try to undo the damage to the Church. Only a few weeks later, the Aupetit case came to national attention.

That Aupetit made increasingly controversial decisions was clear for over a year as he abruptly fired a Catholic high school principal, shut down a Vatican II-style experimental parish, and saw two vicars general — essentially his top lieutenants — quit in silent protest. By the time the popular second vicar general left in March, there were complaints about Aupetit from several quarters, and Rome began to notice.

But it took the Le Point article and archbishop’s miscalculation to get the Vatican to move. Aupetit expected more support from Rome. He submitted his resignation amid the uproar, but he told his priests in an email that his departure was “not on the agenda.”

He seemed to have good reason to assume he was safe. Pope Francis has a decidedly mixed record with his bishops — seemingly critical when he speaks about the abuse of episcopal power in the Church but standing by his men when they’re down.

In France and Germany alone, Aupetit had seen the pontiff reject similar letters from Barbarin while he was still fighting the Lyon case in court and from Munich Cardinal Reinhard Marx, who offered to step down because of Germany’s abuse problem in general. 

In an abuse scandal in Cologne, the former vicar general Stefan Hesse was given a six-month “time out” before returning to his current post as archbishop of Hamburg. The Cologne archbishop, Cardinal Rainer Woelki, is now halfway through his “time out” with no decision about his future so far. 

He seemed to have good reason to assume he was safe. Pope Francis has a decidedly mixed record with his bishops — seemingly critical when he speaks about the abuse of episcopal power in the Church but standing by his men when they’re down.

Looking further afield, the Pope vehemently defended Osorno Bishop Juan Barros — accused of covering up for the influential accused abuser Fr. Fernando Karadima — during a visit to Chile in 2018 and rejected his two offers to resign. He only relented after a fact-finding visit and devastating report by Malta Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the Vatican’s top experts on the sexual abuse issue. The pontiff apologized in the letter to the Catholic Church in Chile and accepted the resignations of its several bishops. But the change of heart did not necessarily signal a turnabout in Francis’s management practices.

Which is why Aupetit may have thought he would be spared. Although there were no rumors linking Aupetit to sexual abuse of minors, his silence after the commission report was published — contrary to the prominent public role the Paris archbishop was expected to play — added to the complaints about him. But he saw no looming problem.

The French Church already had the abuse report to deal with and it didn’t need another very public dispute on top of that. But the Vatican ambassador in France, nuncio Archbishop Celestino Migliore, one of the Vatican’s best diplomats, must have known about the wider problems in Paris and informed Rome. In addition, some Catholic groups in France contacted the Vatican directly with their complaints.

When asked about Aupetit on the airplane taking him home from Greece, Pope Francis gave a rambling answer saying he did not know the details and blaming “chatter” in Paris for Aupetit’s downfall. He called the reported affair a sin, but “not one of the most serious sins.”

“When the chatter grows, grows, grows and takes away a person’s reputation,” Pope Francis  told journalists, “he will not be able to govern because he has lost his reputation … That is why I accepted his resignation, not on the altar of truth, but on the altar of hypocrisy.” 

But Francis showed he did know more, for example mentioning “little caresses and massages he [Aupetit] gave to the secretary” — information the journalists did not know until then.

The official Vatican transcript of the press conference then cut out “to the secretary,” leading French media to speculate later that the woman was actually a female theologian that paparazzi later photographed walking with Aupetit in a forest outside Paris. Did Aupetit give the Vatican an ambiguous description of this relationship, as French media now speculate? Who knows?

The former archbishop was not ambiguous about denying the affair at his farewell Mass on December 10 at Saint-Sulpice, the second-largest church in Paris after Notre Dame cathedral. “A journalist wrote ‘the Archbishop of Paris is lost for love’,” he told the full church. “It’s true, but she forgot the end of the sentence … the full sentence is ‘the Archbishop of Paris was lost for love of Christ.’” 

Another question is what now are the criteria for such a firing? In the past, the Vatican tended to stand by bishops under fire. Will it now fire those who raise too many complaints? Isn’t that an encouragement for anyone who doesn’t like a bishop — for whatever reason — to just complain enough that he will soon be gone?

In the past, the Vatican tended to stand by bishops under fire. Will it now fire those who raise too many complaints? Isn’t that an encouragement for anyone who doesn’t like a bishop – for whatever reason – to just complain enough that he will soon be gone?

All this makes one wonder how the Vatican hires and fires bishops. The tradition is that the local nuncio presents Rome with a terna of three potential bishops, and the pope picks the one he wants.

Aupetit was reportedly championed by his predecessor, Cardinal André Vingt-Trois. The then nuncio in Paris, Archbishop Luigi Ventura may not have been the best judge of the candidates. He slipped out of France in 2019 before a trial that convicted him in absentia of molestation for fondling young men’s bottoms at public events. 

Archbishop Migliore apparently knew all about the Aupetit problem, but the Vatican only acted after the Le Point revelations and the archbishop’s miscalculation based on Pope Francis’s unclear policy on bishops and sexual abuse cases.

Francis ended up terminating Aupetit’s service in the same style the former archbishop’s detractors rightly criticized him for using — abrupt, opaque and, inscrutable. It looked like a panic reaction based on the same reflex leading to abuse cover-ups — avoid scandal. 

This roller-coaster ride has upset local Catholics and added another burden to the French Church, which sank even lower in overall public esteem. It especially angered women, who saw the affair angle overtake more serious issues such as Aupetit’s management and the clerical sexual abuse of minors as the real roots of the Church’s dilemma.

In the longer term, it spelled the end of the “Lustiger system,” named after Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, the charismatic Paris archbishop from 1981-2005 who ruled with an iron fist and imposed his successor on the Vatican. It worked for Lustiger and his skillful but quieter successor, Vingt-Trois. It did not work in the Aupetit case.

The French Church now has to find another Paris archbishop. The front-runner is Reims Archbishop Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, who has done well as head of the bishops conference. Even if that goes smoothly and he shines, the Vatican should not simply go back to “business as usual.”

Bishops have two roles, being spiritual leaders and diocesan managers. It’s natural they might do one better than the other. But when they clearly fail in one — or both — there should be a better way of replacing them. Aupetit failed his management mission and deserved to go. But not in a panic, not so abruptly, not with comments that raised more questions than answers.

Call it the Vatican Whack-a-Mole.