Canonical crimes aplenty

Nick Cafardi, erstwhile dean of the Duquesne U. School of Law and an emiment canonist, was at Villanova Law last week to continue our series on the Philadelphia Grand Jury's report on the Archdiocese.  Cafardi's excellent paper answered many questions that had come up in our earlier session, which Mark and I mentioned here, led by Jim Post (Boston U. and founder of Voice of the Faithful), Chuck Zech (Villanova, economics), and Mark himself.  Specifically, Cafardi avers that if Holy Mother Church had followed her own law, no grand jury anywhere would have had any work to do.  Cafardi explained that can. 1717 requires investigations of a sort systematically avoided in Philadelphia when allegations of a delict reached the chancery; the canon creates a right in the putative victim to have the matter investigated by the bishop (or his delegate).  Cafardi further explained that, subject to can. 1341, can. 1718 would require a bishop, who, having investigated, has reason to believe a delict involving abuse by a priest of a youth has occurred, to proceed to a canonical trial that could result in the imposition of a just canonical penalty.  Can. 1341 prefers the use of "fraternal correction" where that can sufficiently "restore justice," but the tradition stretching back through all the centuries, Cafardi demonstrated, is against the idea that fraternal correction is sufficient in cases of this sort.  It was suggested by a member of the audience that the bishops who utterly disregarded canon law are themselves unprosecuted canonical criminals; the Apostolic See would have to initiate their prosecution.  Cafardi emphasized that while the canon law acknowledges the right of the faithful to have their canoncial rights (e.g., to have a canonical crime investigated and prosecuted) vindicated (see can. 221), canon law is sorely lacking in procedures that would allow the faithful to see those rights vindicated.  Apparently, a penultimate draft of the 1983 Code included "administrative recourse" procedures that would have give given the faithful some opportunity to seek the vindication of their canonical rights.

Is it surprising that, in a (Catholic) culture that increasingly denies the divinely-ordained hierarchical structure of that perfect and juridically-structured society that is the Church, the bishops would fail to act in a way that would require them to acknowledge their munus as law-bound rulers of the Church?