When Will the Covid-Era Bishops Be Held Accountable?

The United States Senate will soon vote whether to hold Dr. Anthony Fauci in contempt for refusing to answer a Senate committee’s questions. On July 29, the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing in which Fauci, former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination when asked about decisions he made during his tenure as Covid Czar. Republicans characterized it as oversight of what the government did during Covid; Democrats called the hearing a backward-looking waste of time to “relitigate” Covid history.

My interest is not in the hearing. I am interested in why there hasn’t been a similar discussion inside the Catholic Church about ecclesiastical performance during Covid.

Bishops across the United States took the unprecedented action of closing churches and shutting down public Masses, in some cases for a year or more. Many Catholics died alone, bereft of the sacraments, including Reconciliation, Anointing, and Viaticum. In some places, it was alleged that Confirmation was “administered” not by episcopal hands but by Q-tips.

And, in the six years since Covid broke out, there has not been any autopsy of the bishops’—and Pope Francis’—decisions. In an era where “synodality” is declared a “style” of ecclesiastical “dialogue” and synodal “conversations in the spirit” dare to deconstruct received dogma and discipline, the de rigueur “dialogues” have yet to reach a public discussion that might suggest the ecclesiastical response to Covid was wrong.

Francis promoted the image of the Church as “field hospital.” Happily, that expression has fallen into eclipse. It’s hard to take seriously an ecclesiastical MASH unit that shuts its doors just as the war breaks out. We remember the image of a lone pope giving Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament over an empty St. Peter’s Square. But that image does not account for the real absence of the Blessed Sacrament from accompaniment of God’s People for the next months, one imposed by ecclesiastical discipline.

Let’s probe the “field hospital” image a little further. When a real hospital experiences a crisis, it typically conducts something of an after-crisis “postmortem” to evaluate its actions. Was our response correct? What worked? What didn’t? What should we have done differently? What assumptions did we make that were proven—and unproven? What do we do next time?

Have we heard the USCCB conduct such a postmortem? Within itself? With the faithful? Given that the Synodal Secretariat is telling dioceses around the world to review their synodal structures in preparation for the next Roman roundtables, is there any bishop man enough to step up and say: “Let’s talk about what we did during Covid?”

Is there any bishop who will convene his “planning committees” and his “listening groups” to prowl his diocese and—without preselection of favorites—undertake an honest hearing of the faithful still in the pews about what they thought of the hierarchy’s performance during Covid?

Or are we to “move on,” “discern the future,” and conveniently forget about in some cases 12 months without Sunday Mass? 

Have we honestly faced the hollowing out of parishes where, while Catholics returned to the pews, their numbers were often still not what they were before 2020? Have we asked how “spiritual communions” and “TV Mass” undermined Catholics’ sense and appreciation of sacramentality? Have we questioned whether the bogeyman of “clericalism” was diminished or enhanced when Sunday Mass came again largely to be understood as a matter of dispensable ecclesiastical discipline?

Nearly a quarter century after the Boston sex scandals that marked phase one of clerical buggering (phase two was marked by the Uncle Teddy revelations and cover-up) it’s staggering to say that there has been more open intra-ecclesial discussion about sex abuse—hierarchical weaving and dodging notwithstanding—than about the phenomenon of mass shutdown of the Mass that touched almost every Catholic across the globe.

Relying on separation of church and state, one hopes our episcopal class is not hoping to invoke the Fifth Amendment en masse.