Opinion: How Do You Know There Were No Red Flags?

A Priest sentenced to life in prison and his superiors remind me of Sgt Schulz in 'Hogan's Heroes', 'I know nothing!' Sickening.

From Catholic World Report

By Christopher Altieri

The case of Fr. Robert McWilliams demonstrates that it’s not enough to lament what wasn’t known; rather, there must be an effort to find out just exactly what went sideways and when and how.

If you’re Catholic, and if you make any effort to stay abreast of news about the Church, you probably read this week about the two bishops and an entire seminary staff who exonerated themselves of any responsibility for the criminal predations of the sociopathic sexual deviant they trained, ordained, and assigned to ministry.

I’m referring to the case of Fr. Robert McWilliams of the Diocese of Cleveland, who entered a guilty plea in July to federal sex crimes including child pornography and was sentenced this week to life in prison.

The National Catholic Register quoted the rector of the Cleveland seminary where McWilliams trained, Fr. Mark Latcovich, to the effect that there were no red flags on McWilliams, for whose formation Latcovich was responsible.

“Were there any flags that said, ‘Oh, now that this has happened, I did notice X’? Absolutely not,” the Register quoted him as saying. The Pillar reported that McWilliams was known to his peers as a tech-savvy fellow who kept his private affairs to himself, and an inveterate rule-breaker who bragged about using his cellular phone to avoid seminary security measures and also dealt in contraband.

So, there were no red flags that Fr. Latcovich saw waving, if we are to take him at his word.

Then again, Fr. Latcovich also recalled the words of Archbishop Nelson Perez – then Bishop Perez of Cleveland – at the time police collared McWilliams: “Only one person is responsible [for McWilliams’ malfeasance] and that’s Bobby McWilliams.” I mean, maybe? Sorta? Yeah, but … still?

Fr. Latcovich also recalled Archbishop Perez saying, “[McWilliams is] the one who never allowed the formation program to help him.”

Wait, what?

If by “help” he means “spot his sociopathy and sexual deviance before he can get into orders and act on his proclivities,” then, sure. Fr. Latcovich told the Register they’d have helped McWilliams come to grips with his issues before he committed the crimes that got him life in prison. The thing is, McWilliams wanted to be in Orders. Apparently, the bishops and the seminary formators wanted him to be in Orders, too. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have been ordained.

Meanwhile, their concern is apparently for what they could have done for the sociopath, if only he’d acknowledged his depravity and asked them for help. That’s all fine and good, but their concern for the victims that their failure to police McWilliams had a hand in creating is rather conspicuous by way of absence from their stated considerations, at least from the Register piece.

The whole business is eerily similar to the line taken by Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades of Fort Wayne-South Bend recently, when it emerged that one of his new men allegedly decided to go on a bender and get frisky with a couple of girls from the local high school where he was a chaplain, after plying them with alcohol. Twice.

“Temptation and sin, I guess, you know, happens,” Bishop Rhoades told journalists at a hastily arranged (not to say “Shepilovian”) press conference on September 29^th, a little more than a week after the diocese had learned of the allegations against the priest, Fr. David Huneck, “but I can’t really think of anything that we could have done differently – I mean, there were no red flags – so, it really is extremely troubling.”

It is extremely troubling. The two questions nobody in attendance asked are: “How do you know there were no red flags?” and, “Have you even tried to think about what you could have done differently?”

A week – even two – is barely enough time to compile a list of all the people investigators would want to interview as a matter of course. It’s certainly not enough time to get any real digging done into the guy’s history, associations, extra-curriculars, etc. Not to mention his time in formation, his teachers, classmates, the pastors and laity of parishes to which he was assigned, administrators and teachers and students – current and former – at the high school where he was a chaplain.

Now, the business in Cleveland is worse by orders of magnitude than the business in Fort Wayne-South Bend – incommensurable, really – but the leadership responses track with each other in troubling ways.

“If there was a magic thing that we could do that would predict this,” Fr. Latcovich told the Register, “we would be first in line to get it, and it would be worth all the money we could spend on this for the good of the Church.”

“I don’t know if there’s any kind of protocol that would have fixed it,” Fr. Latcovich also said. He’s not wrong. There isn’t. Bad guys will fly under the radar. Bad actors will get through. Terrible things will happen.

When a train derails, the NTSB doesn’t say, “Look, if we knew it was going to crash, we would’ve done something.” There would be calls for heads on plates. That’s why they say things like: “We’ll find out what happened, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.” Then, they find out what happened, and then write and release reports of their findings, which usually contain lots of helpful suggestions about how to make sure whatever happened doesn’t happen again.

Could one of these guys, just once, acknowledge that things went horribly sideways – maybe on their watch, maybe not – and promise to toss the whole place in an effort to find out just exactly what went sideways and when and how, and then make good on the promise, and resolve to fix it or die trying?