Event Brief: This Is Our Real Mission

“This Is Our Real Ministry” Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., on the Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crises Keeley Vatican Lecture April 5, 2022

The Keeley Vatican Lecture 2022 “This is our real ministry”: Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J., on the Catholic Church’s response to the sexual abuse crises

BY GRÁINNE MCEVOY

“What [survivors] want is a listening heart, and a listening ear, and understanding, and that is a basic human attitude that we can all offer.”

—Fr. Hans Zollner, S.J. To deliver its marquee Keeley Vatican Lecture for 2022, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies was honored to welcome the Rev. Dr. Hans Zollner, S.J., one of the Vatican’s foremost experts on the safeguarding of children and vulnerable persons and healing for victims of sexual abuse. In his lecture, Fr. Zollner explored his perspective on a “double crises”: sex abuse by members of the clergy and its coverup by Church authorities. He also reflected on these crises in light of recent European developments including the January 2022 report on abuse and coverup in the Archdiocese of Munich and the war in Ukraine.

Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics, welcomed Fr. Zollner to the University of Notre Dame. He explained how the safeguarding of children—a process that takes both vulnerability and agency into account—connects to the Nanovic Institute

This Is Our Real Ministry

and Keough School of Global Affairs’ commitment to the concept of integral human development (IHD). A term coined by Pope Paul VI, IHD puts the idea of dignity at the center of social relations and transformations, and refers to the development of each person, including children and youth and the vulnerable. These groups, which normally have no voice are, more often than not, excluded from discourses about development, theology, and from ecclesial processes, a lacuna that Pope Francis has explicitly sought to address.

Fr. Zollner was introduced by Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Rev. John A. O’Brien College Professor of American Studies, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and Nanovic Institute faculty fellow. Congratulating the Nanovic Institute on an inspired choice for the 2022 Keeley Vatican Lecture, Cummings highlighted the key contributions Fr. Zollner has made to the work of those researchers striving to understand and help resolve this crisis. In particular, she explained “Fr. Zollner persistently reminds us that the sex abuse crisis is a global one and we must always resist the impulse to impose our Western cultural assumptions and perspectives across global cultures.” Cummings said that his work has also shown that because there has been no single cause of the crisis of sexual abuse, efforts to find a resolution must be “multifaceted and interdisciplinary,” involving psychologists, theologians, historians, sociologists, and other scholars. She explained that Fr. Zollner’s work urges Catholics to be relentless in studying sex abuse and demanding transparency, accountability, and work for healing “not only for the survivors but for the Church itself.”

“We need to own it and act upon it” Fr. Zollner opened his lecture by explaining that he intended to give his audience some points about the realities and interpretations of the global Church sex abuse crisis and to invite listeners to “own the topic more, not only as an intellectual exercise … but also as something that you cope with, you try to enter into, you commit to.” He said that everyone, within their particular role or responsibility, has something to contribute to finding a resolution and to making a difference

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This Is Our Real Ministry

in the safeguarding of vulnerable persons, especially children. Of this crisis, Fr. Zollner insisted, “we need to own it and act upon it.”

He identified two major points of resistance that he sees as preventing this universal ownership. There is a divergence, he noted, between those parts of the world that have been confronted with the scandal of abuse from early on—such as Canada, Ireland, the U.S., and Australia—and regions in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceana that have not yet started to face their own experience and legacy of abuse. Despite a now decades-long awareness of the crisis in certain parts of the world, Fr. Zollner warned “this is not a passé topic.” As a global crisis, this is just the beginning, and the media and other observers have yet to take seriously the full scope of the problem. Secondly, survivors are acutely aware of the lack of empathy and sympathy and “long for a different Church and a different attitude and a different understanding.” Many victims, Fr. Zollner explained, are not interested in money or public attention, but wish only to be listened to.

The complex challenges of a global crisis Fr. Zollner expanded upon how the sex abuse crisis is perceived worldwide, and the challenges those responses pose to the process of resolution and healing. He explained that the problem “is present everywhere, but openness to take it on is not.” While we know that clergy all over the world are guilty of the sexual abuse of children and vulnerable people, in many places there is a seemingly intractable lack of will to admit and confront the problem.

In many countries, he explained, we see a lack of knowledge, willingness to engage, and an acute discomfort when it comes to talking openly about sexuality in general or sexual misbehavior in particular, including that by people of authority in the Church. Part of this, Fr. Zollner said, is that some societies are not prepared to face up to the pervasiveness of the problem of sexual abuse.

The Italian bishops conference, for example, has yet to establish an independent commission on the abuses of the past. Italian society, he explains is not ready to confront the sexual abuse that has

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been rife in the sectors of tourism, fashion, cinema, sports, and beyond. In other locations, the particularities of context, culture, and history play a part in the refusal to confront the problem. Fr. Zollner presented the example of the Czech Republic where bishops have told him that even when they know a priest is guilty of abuse of a minor, they will never report him to the police. “This is a scandal to us and a scandal in the legal system,” he said, but it is “psychologically understandable” in a former Soviet Bloc context where priests had spent decades of their ministry viewing the police, media, and state-directed psychiatry as enemies of the Church. In such contexts, the approach has been what psychologists describe as “passive aggression and passive resistance,” whereby the problem is ignored and any response is delayed, postponed, and, as a consequence, reactive to an eventual media and public outcry.

When the full extent of the crisis is examined, Fr. Zollner said that one of the great mysteries of the Catholic Church is why, for a global institution, we see so little transfer of experience, expertise, and learning. He asked: “we proclaim in the Creed that we are one Church, but where does this oneness lie in regard to dealing with cases of abuse?” At the same time, the complexity of cultural, historical, or regional contexts, he explains, helps to understand why such knowledgetransfer is so difficult to achieve and why there is “no one-size-fits-all approach.”

A systemic problem and a double crises Fr. Zollner explored recent developments that caused shockwaves within specific European countries—and globally—and which demonstrated the systemic nature of the clergy sexual abuse crises and, importantly, how Church authorities have responded to them. His first, and most recent example was the report on the Archdiocese of Munich, published in January 2022, which focused not on the already-uncovered sexual abuse but on how officials within the archdiocese had dealt with the allegations and responded to victims. This damning report found that between 1945 and 2019, not one of the seven Archbishops of Munich had handled allegations of abuse as he should have.

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This Is Our Real Ministry

The report detailed decades of negligence, refusals to listen to victims, and the protection of abuser priests, and it drew worldwide attention because then-Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger, before he was elevated to Pope Benedict XVI, was among those those negligent archbishops.

For Fr. Zollner, the important point to emerge from this example, and others from France and Poland, is that the Church’s failure to respond to victims was not only due to the personalities of specific bishops or archbishops. Instead, he said, “there is something within the Church—its institutions, organization, rules, procedures—that has not helped to confront abuse, to stop it, to do what needs to be done in the punishment, penalty, and betterment of perpetrators and in listening to and helping survivors of abuse and their families and communities.”

It is this systemic and systematic coverup by bishops, cardinals, and even a church leader who would later be elected pope that makes the Church’s sexual abuse scandal a “double crises.” It also provokes defensive reactions from many of the people that Fr. Zollner encounters in his work and research. He has experienced resistance from Catholics around the world who say that this is a Western problem brought on by positioning celibate priests within secularized societies. Others believe that the media has fabricated stories of coverup because so many journalists are anti-Catholic, and see their tenacity on the subject as further evidence of the media’s desire to destroy the Church.

Many Catholics also erroneously believe that a number of allegations of abuse are false, or give the defense that the problem is worse in other institutions—public schools, the Boy Scouts, other churches. To this latter point, Fr. Zollner said that abuse by a Catholic priest or religious is all the more abhorrent because “we are and pretend to be different. We stand for a Church that proclaims the gospel of salvation and not of suffering.”

In the face of this denial, Fr. Zollner is deeply convinced that this problem will not go away and describes the challenge of understanding and resolving the scourge of abuse as “a generational

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task.” He warns: “As the Church moves on [at] glacial speed and changes … very slowly, either we have much patience and invest energy, or we will be very deeply disappointed.”

Beginning to address the systemic question In February 2019, Pope Francis responded to these double crises by convening a meeting of the presidents of episcopal conferences, of the Eastern churches, and of all male and female superiors general of religious orders. Those gathered were charged with addressing three systemic questions.

The first task was to define the responsibility of the Ordinary (the bishop or provincial) and how they should implement new norms and guidelines. Next, the meeting considered how to develop a culture of accountability in a Church where there is none. Fr. Zollner explained that there is no substantive noun for that concept in the three main languages—French, Italian, and Spanish—that are spoken by the majority of Catholics around the globe. As he reflected: “if you don’t have a word for [accountability], what does that mean? It means that you don’t think about it, you don’t talk about it, and you can’t act accordingly.” Lastly, the meeting focused on transparency, both within the Church and in relation to the outside world. The existing problems include the highly secretive nature of canonical trials, and the fraught nature of communicating externally to the media, exemplified by the Holy See’s slow response to the Archdiocese of Pennsylvania’s grand jury report in August 2018.

In response, the Church has made some concrete changes. These include the introduction, in June 2019, of a new law for the universal Church in the form of vox estis lux mundo (you are the light of the world), which introduced the concept of accountability in an expressive and universal way, and gave bishops co-responsibility to ask for accountability among their brethren. This law was later applied in Poland where ten bishops were asked to step down because of negligence and coverup.

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“This is our real ministry” In his concluding thoughts, Fr. Zollner reiterated his opening message that the Faithful all have a role in creating transparency and finding a path toward healing. In particular, he urges, they must “realize how much of the trauma of the victims of abuse is present in our midst. We don’t acknowledge that and we don’t live through it.” He described how the emergence of this past harm in recent years had been provoking a kind of post-traumatic stress reaction within the Church that has rendered Catholics shocked, paralyzed, and unsure of what to do next. This process, Fr. Zollner explained, is part of why many priests and others ask: “when is this going to be over so that we can get back to our real ministry?”

“This is our real ministry,” Fr. Zollner insisted. “This is what God is calling us to today.”

While the focus on the sexual abuse crisis should not be all-consuming, he argued that the major issues the Church has to face today—its relationship with the world, modern society, media, science, power—all converge in the question of whether the Church is capable of listening to those who have been harmed and of dealing with the reality of that trauma. “We need to own it ourselves,” he concluded, “what can you do, what can I do so that we can be a safer place, a safer society, and a safer Church.”

The Keeley Vatican Lecture, facilitated annually by the Nanovic Institute, provides a way to deepen Notre Dame’s connection to the Holy See by bringing distinguished representatives from the Vatican to explore questions surrounding the University’s Catholic mission. Established in 2005 through the generous support of alumnus Terrence R. Keeley, lecturers typically spend several days on campus, joining classes, celebrating Mass with students and conversing with faculty members. For a complete archive of the series, visit nanovic.nd.edu/vatican.

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