Culpability and the Catholic Church 12 Apr 2010 The facts are no longer open to interpretation: not only bishops and archbishops, but the then head of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, AKA the Inquisition, knew and covered up rather than dealt with pedophiles in the priesthood, and enabled further abuse. Michael Ruse, long an accommodationist, has now conceded that Dawkins is right that the Catholic Church is a criminal and corrupt organisation, and needs to be reformed (we’ve heard that once or twice before, I think). Why is everyone surprised? Not about the pedophilia – although I think that “protect the children” has become something of a witch and heresy hunt these days, we should be disgusted and horrified when children are abused – but rather about a large institution like the Catholic Church being more concerned about itself than those it has harmed? Corporate entities are composed of many individuals following ritualised practices. Since any subpopulation of a society is likely to have roughly the same distributions of moral and social features that the larger population does, and we know that pedophiles are a percentage of the general population, it follows that a percentage of the Church will be pedophiles (likewise, thieves, murderers, drunk drivers, and Manchester United supporters), although there is reason to think that the rule of celibacy, which was, if memory serves, introduced in the Catholic Church in the middle ages, tends to concentrate pedophiles above the background rate. So given that any institution of comparable size will have to deal with this human deviation, the issue is not that there are pedophiles etc., but how they deal with them. Corporations tend to reward behaviours that support and reinforce the privilege of the corporation, and those inside a corporation tend to be weeded out if they do not identify their own personal interests with those of the corporation. You select for Corporation Man. It doesn’t imply cynicism on the part of the players, though – we are inordinately good at rationalisation of things that we do for other reasons (something like the Marxist view of “false consciousness“). It only means that those who end up in a position of power in some corporation will be the end result of years of selection for conformity and groupthink. As Z says in Men in Black, they are everything we have come to expect from years of [corporate] training. There’s another point to be made, though. Is there a corporate interest? Do large organisations have interests at all? One somewhat deprecated view of social institutions that it may surprise nobody to know I think is right is that of methodological individualism, which is, in brief, the view that all that exists in social dynamics are agents, usually coterminous with biological individuals.* For our purposes here we can say something like this: moral culpability begins and ends in the actions of individual members of the Catholic Church, not the Church itself (because it’s the wrong level of description for moral matters). So Ratzinger is responsible. The bishops and archbishops are responsible. And most of all the pedophile priests are responsible. But the Church is not responsible, because the Church is the wrong kind of entity to be held responsible. Moreover, when people do talk about the moral standing of the Church, they often tend to occlude the personal responsibility of those agents who acted. If you aim to remove the whole Church, as Dawkins and now Ruse do, then you run the risk of two errors: 1. Overlooking the individual responsibilities, and 2. Imputing moral agency to those who in fact had nothing to do with it. For example, I am a white dude, of some privilege (I live in a country where I was able to eventually get a PhD, where I have the vote and legal rights, etc.). To impute to me the moral culpability of those who also are or were white dudes, say, in the treatment of Australian indigenes, runs the risk of trivialising the culpability of those who actually tracked them down and murdered them, raped their women,and stole their lands. I benefit from states of affairs in place before I was born, yes, but am I morally culpable here? If you say so, and many do, I think you have trivialised the very notion moral culpability itself. I am culpable for those things I had moral agency in, and the past I do not. Not every member of the Catholic Church is culpable for the acts of those who abused children. Many simply did not know about it. Some knew and put their careers on the line to have the priests punished and removed. They are, actually, in some way moral heroes. That the Corporation Men failed to take actions should surprise nobody, and unless one happens to be a member of no corporate entity, such as castaways on deserted islands, either we are all equally as “guilty” of the crimes of those in our shared societies and institutions, or only those who actually did the crimes are. It should not need saying, but probably does, that knowing and taking no action is morally culpable under a notion called duty of care. We are all responsible to protect the defenceless in society, and if you knew about the pedophilia, or any moral outrage, and did nothing, you share blame, albeit less blame than the positive agents. So what does this imply for the Catholic Church? A purge is needed, that much is clear. If there is to be a Catholic Church in the future in our societies, it must be more accountable and open, and live up to its own doctrine of Original Sin, and accept that it has individuals within it that, well, sin. A little openness to secular law wouldn’t hurt much, either. Just because they arrogate to themselves all juridicial power shouldn’t mean we acquiesce in that; if a priest commits a crime, the priest doesn’t get out of jail on the bishop’s or the Inquisition’s sayso. And a shakeup is needed for any corporation from time to time, to break the hold on institutional rituals and the complacency of the Corporate Men. But will the Church dissolve? Hardly. If and when the Catholic Church collapses, it will either be because it has schismed out of existence, or because it simply is unfit in the social environment, and it goes extinct like any maladapted species. But, as I repeatedly observe, religions are marvellously adaptive and dynamic things, fluid rather than rigid, although they have a degree of institutional inertia. My bet will be that it will reform itself as fast as it can, and yet always be slightly behind the times due to its size and the very simple fact that people, those who make it and every other institution up, have memories and habits. * This is not to say that by describing individuals alone you can account for all social behaviours, as you still need to describe the relations between individuals. There’s a bit of argument over this, he said airily… Evolution History Metaphysics Philosophy Politics Religion Sermon Social dominance Social evolution Evolution
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I agree with your assessment of how corporate institutions come to further corporate interests, and note that this seems to be the case for other kinds of organizations involving groups of people and hierarchy, whether formally incorporated or not. Cass Sunstein’s _Why Societies Need Dissent_, which I’ve just begun reading, discusses some of the forces for conformity and self-silencing in groups–and seeing oneself as a member of a group is one of the most powerful psychological factors for the suppression of dissent. I’m not convinced that institutions aren’t reasonable subjects of moral evaluation in addition to individuals, at least in cases where unethical policies have themselves been institutionalized. Surely we can morally evaluate apartheid as a system as well as the actions of individuals who put it in place and maintained it. And there’s a difference between those who continue to support a system, knowing that it is unethical, and those who fail to recognize it. Miranda Fricker argues that individuals of past cultures who endorsed things that we would consider morally wrong today but which were widely acceptable at the time (e.g., slavery, infanticide, child abuse) may not be blameworthy, but they were still morally wrong for supporting cases of historic injustice. (Ethics Bites episode: http://www.open2.net/ethicsbites/blame-historic-injustice.html )
I think we have to evaluate, prudentially, whether an organisation is one we want to have, such as a criminal conspiracy, but we cannot put an institution in jail or otherwise punish it (even if we strip the assets, it seems to me we are behaving instrumentally). The only moral agents are those who run them, take decisions in them, and act in their name.
A terrific post John. Unfortunately, it is very hard to see a shake-up coming from the present Pope. Every fresh revelation seems to implicate and compromise him further. He seems to have been very much a part of the problem. So where will the change come from? For the first time in 2000 years, will it come from below? Also hard to imagine, though not totally impossible. Is it conceivable that the chorus of indignation from outside and from inside the church will make B16 feel that his situation is untenable? Maybe the next one will be a reforming pope like J23, or maybe we will have a Vatican III, but I find it hard to be optimistic, and anyway can the present disaster spin out that long? Can the present Watergate-like situation possibly continue? By the way, did you see that Dawkins is denying saying anything like “I will arrest the Pope” as he is reported in the Murdoch press. He is in fact demanding an apology.
I doubt this will have much effect on the perceived charism of the papacy or the institutional Church. If the institution can survive the corruptions of the renaissance popes, it will most likely survive the current scandals.
Strictly speaking, the Church didn’t survive the Renaissance popes. It caused the last great schism, AKA the reformation.
Referring to the institutional Church, as opposed to the body of believers, there may be a few tweeks here and there in response to the recent spate of bad press, but Church governance will remain unchanged. Hendrik Hertzberg sums it up in today’s “New Yorker ( http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/04/19/100419taco_talk_hertzberg ) The Catholic Church is an authoritarian institution, modelled on the political structures of the Roman Empire and medieval Europe. It is better at transmitting instructions downward than at facilitating accountability upward. It is monolithic. It claims the unique legitimacy of a line of succession going back to the apostolic circle of Jesus Christ. Its leaders are protected by a nimbus of mystery, pomp, holiness, and, in the case of the Pope, infallibility—to be sure, only in certain doctrinal matters, not administrative ones, but the aura is not so selective. The hierarchy of such an institution naturally resists admitting to moral turpitude and sees squalid scandal as a mortal threat…
I agree with you that corporate entities are not in themselves agents and therefore can’t be culpable (nor do they have rights, in my view). However, I don’t think this needs to be the case in order to argue that the Catholic Church, as an institution, should be dismantled. Take Enron, for example. Of course I don’t put any blame on the entity itself for the crimes committed by some of its employees–the blame lies with the people who committed fraud, and those who knew about it and covered it up. And it’s definitely true that not all of its employees were involved in accounting fraud. But I agree with the actions of the US government, which took everyone involved in the scandal to court and basically pulled Enron apart piece by piece, leaving only an empty corporate shell behind. Enron as a corporate entity still exists today, but it has no real power or influence any more. I’d like to see some governments do the same to the Catholic church as they did to Enron–jail their leaders, seize their assets, and sue their pants off. It wouldn’t destroy the church as an abstract corporate entity, but it would have the material effect of eliminating the Church for all intents and purposes. It seems to me that that is what Ruse and Dawkins are talking about when they call the church a criminal organization. It’s not a claim that the church qua institution can be a morally culpable agent–rather that there is so much corruption within the church that it should be taken apart. That’ll never happen, of course, because governments tend to be cowardly when it comes to religion. If Microsoft were embroiled in a similar scandal, its days would be numbered, just like Enron’s were when the full scale of their fraud was revealed. But that won’t happen to the church. Not because the Church will reform (I seriously, seriously doubt it will any time soon), but simply because those who have the power to take them on won’t do it.
Yes, I cover that in my reply to Jim above. We may decide to strip the Church of its assets both punitively and to pay the costs and damages to those it has harmed. If that results in the Church becoming a marginal organisation, then that is the way of cultural evolution. There is no historical presumption that any institution will survive.
Good to see we agree thus far. But it seems to me that your methodological individualism (which I agree with) can be accommodated to the Ruse/Dawkins view on the church as a criminal organization (which I also agree with). Couldn’t we just define criminal organization as “An organization such that just prosecution of all the morally culpable agents in the institution would result in the institution’s demise” and have a version of the Ruse/Dawkins argument which is compatible with methodological individualism? As far as I can tell, it doesn’t seem to me that one must accept corporate entities as moral agents in order to accept Ruse’s overall point: That the Catholic church is criminal and should be dismantled.
I think the main reason some states can dismantle corporations is because there is a specific legal framework, of which the charter is an integral element, for dealing with these entities as individuals (in the “legal fiction” sense) that are subject to a privileged existence (i.e. they are not free agents in the true legal sense). Some governments do reserve the right to seize assets that are related to a criminal enterprise, but usually a link has to be made between the crime committed by an individual or individuals in an organisation and the organisations own finances (unless you’re a lonely pot grower who can’t afford good legal representation of course). Hypothetically, if the entire workforce of Microsoft from Bill Gates downwards were all found to be child molesters acting completely independently and without knowledge of each others actions outside of their offices and on their own dime, the US government would actually have very little authority to bring any kind of action against MS as a corporate entity (it would meet considerable resistance from the shareholders if it did). As far as I can tell, the best course for legal action is to continue going after actual child molesters. With this regard, countries already have powers to subpoena witnesses or material directly relating to specific cases, and can perhaps penalize individual dioceses or even just churches, but I don’t think there is a feasible way to broaden the prosecution to an assault on the RCC more generally. At best, one could float a conspiracy charge against individuals peripherally involved in certain incidents that are seated in Rome, but making that stick will be tricky given that such accusations must cross multiple borders and legal jurisdictions. International law is, of course, useless because nobody takes it seriously, and nobody holds domestic law inferior to it, hence a mass murder being released by Britain rather than deported to be charged for his crimes. btw, I second previous “excellent post” and “I agree” comments inre the main piece. Good stuff.
You may a good point. However, if a specific institution has a history or pattern of specific classes of problems it is worth examining why that institution as an institution has problems. In the case of the Catholic Church, the fact that they’ve systematically engaged in cover-ups where some other denominations have not does give rise to the question about what structually or theologically is creating these differences. Also, whether or not an institution has moral culpability is distinct from whether the destruction/dismantlement/removal/disbanding/etc. of that institution will serve the greater good.
I’m not enough of a student of theology to make the point correctly, but isn’t the mystical unity of the church an article of the faith among the Catholics? Apostolic succession, the correct interpretation of scripture, and the authority of the hierarchy are warranted by the continuous presence and activity of the third person of the Trinity. I’m not suggesting that we indict the Holy Ghost under RICO, but the church’s own concepts of the personality of collective entities implies that the church can be thought of as having responsibility over and beyond the responsibility of the individuals who belong to it. The writ of methodological individualism doesn’t run everywhere, not in the Magisterium and not, for that matter, in the Supreme Court of the United States, which recently reaffirmed the personhood of chartered corporations.