Every week, this newsroom receives emails like the ones you will not read today. Signed with pseudonyms, sent from accounts created for the occasion, with explicit fear of retaliation. They recount the double lives of specific clerics, complete with names, parishes, and approximate dates, yet almost never with a single piece of evidence. We do not publish them. This newspaper does not print rumors, no matter how plausible they may sound. But the very influx is a fact, and that fact is indeed news.
What this influx reveals is not the truth of each case, which we do not know, but something prior: the faithful have ceased to use the Church’s official channels. They write to a newspaper because they have concluded that the chancellery is the place where allegations go to die. Almost all the emails contain a phrase equivalent to this: the proceedings, if there were any, were conducted in secret. That conditional sums up everything. Not even the best-informed complainant knows whether their allegation ever existed for the institution that was supposed to process it.
Canonical discretion had a purpose: to protect the reputation of the innocent while the truth is investigated. Converted into a permanent system of management, it produces the exact opposite. When nothing is ever clarified, everything becomes plausible. The exemplary priest bears the suspicion that the concealed one does not pay. The entire cassock remains under a presumption of guilt, and that presumption was not fabricated by a hostile press, but by the ecclesiastical administration of silence.
The most unsettling aspect of these emails is not what they denounce, but their tone. No one expects anything anymore. They write as one who enters something into the record, not as one seeking justice. They take for granted that the accused will be reassigned, that the file will not exist or will never be made known, that the bishop of the day will manage appearances. A flock that accepts the double life of a portion of its clergy as a feature of the landscape has not become tolerant. It has become skeptical, which is the threshold of indifference. And indifference empties churches far faster than any scandal.
It is the incoherence that scandalizes: that of one who preaches what he does not practice, and that of one who, duty-bound to watch over, conceals. The faithful can be asked to forgive the sinner; they have been doing so for two thousand years and do so with themselves every night. What cannot be asked of them is to fund and obey a system designed so that nothing is ever known. Veritas liberabit vos, teaches the Gospel. The chancelleries practice another maxim: that the truth, if it arrives at all, should arrive late, in secret, and without consequences. In official bulletins, they call this prudence.