How a “hermeneutic of suspicion” can help the Church today

The term “hermeneutic”, like “consubstantial” and “immaculate”, proves that Catholics are good with polysyllabic words. A “hermeneutic” is a principle of interpretation or approach to understanding. “Hermeneutic” became common in Church circles during Benedict XVI’s papacy, when the Pope distinguished between the hermeneutic of “reform” (and “renewal in the continuity”) and the hermeneutic of “discontinuity and rupture” to discuss how to understand doctrinal development and how Vatican II fit with what preceded it.

I want to suggest the Church might need an additional hermeneutic: the “hermeneutic of suspicion”.

The Vatican has recently gone into overdrive in addressing cases of priests involved in or “credibly accused” of sexual abuse. Its latest tactic (which some of us think dilatory) is acting as if, absent final and proven adjudication of an abuse finding, openly discussing such charges represents an injustice of detraction or calumny. One wonders, for example, about its possible impact on the slow-tracking of the Marko Rupnik case.

Pope Francis himself has used this tactic for years. When Chilean abuse victims attacked his appointment of Bishop Juan Barros–at least credibly involved with a central figure in Chile’s sex abuse scandals–Francis’s first reaction was to call the protests “slander”. When evidence backed the protestors, Francis subsequently apologized and Barros disappeared. But, throughout his pontificate, Francis’s constant preaching about “gossip” (would that he focused as much on sexual ethics!) suggests it is the one chapter in moral theology not subject to “doctrinal evolution” in this papacy.

I think, however, that the Church might learn something from the “hermeneutic of suspicion,” which starts from the premise that things aren’t always as they claim to be. As literary theorist Rita Felski puts it, the hermeneutic of suspicion “circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths…” In other words, by questioning the truth of what’s claimed, the hermeneutic of suspicion asks whether such “explanations” actually protect those whose interests or power benefit from maintaining the status quo.

The “hermeneutic of suspicion” is operative, in some sense, in the American checks and balances system. Suspicious that sinful men will be prone to abuse power, the Constitution institutionalizes ways of diluting power so that damage can be limited even if one surrenders to his “less flattering” impulses.

Something of the “hermeneutic of suspicion” can also be found in the Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan, a 1964 case involving libel law. In that case, an Alabama Commissioner of Public Affairs sued the paper over an advertisement collecting money for a legal defense fund for Martin Luther King. The ad contained some factual inaccuracies about the Commissioner, who demanded its retraction. When the paper refused, he sued and got a conviction under Alabama’s libel law.

On appeal, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the conviction, introducing into libel law a distinction between ordinary folk and “public officials.” For a successful libel action against the latter, one must not only prove statements about them were false but that the publisher knew them to be false yet still acted in “actual malice” by publishing them.

The Court’s logic was that the power available to public officials to use against their critics and to hide potential wrongdoing was greater than the average person’s ability to compete with and expose it. Healthy democratic discourse demands the right of people to voice their suspicions about those in power, even if they cannot immediately prove them. Obviously, a healthy free press should also want to investigate those suspicions objectively and thereby hold public officials and accusers accountable.

I know there are critics of Sullivan who say that it is judge-made law, that previous libel law sufficed, and that it opened up public officials to all manner of character assassination. Perhaps that is true. But maybe it’s the only way to better balance the power in play between the governed and those governing.

Why do I raise these questions?

Because both the notion of “hermeneutic of suspicion” and the logic behind New York Times v. Sullivan may illumine a side of the “good name” question to which the Church’s current tack seems oblivious. Those with power, in the Church or state, do not always lay all their cards out in the open.

So, is Rome suggesting that the proper Catholic response to a claim about sexual abuse should be to deny it until proven otherwise, never to give credence to its veracity or to consider who might benefit from its denial? That seems incredibly credulous, a naivete of which the Church’s two millennia of human experience should disabuse it.

Take the Vatican’s 2020 report about how Theodore McCarrick got to where he did ecclesiastically. It reeks of denial of the “hermeneutic of suspicion” in favor of a credulity that appears to be the result of protecting the “good name” of the ex-Cardinal at all costs. Are we to believe an allegation that a Catholic bishop bedding adult seminarians was not so “out of the ordinary” in the mid-1980s that it did not set off warning bells? Should not Rome have thought it fitting proactively to examine not just whether the claim was “credible” but to insist for the good of the Church that the allegation be affirmatively disproven?

Yes, an accused cleric has a right to his good name. But that cleric is not the only party with interests here. The Church has a right to moral integrity in her hierarchical leadership. And no one has a right to an ecclesiastical appointment.

We all know that the erosion of hierarchical moral integrity has compromised the Church’s moral leadership. A cursory reading of “the signs of the times” should make Rome aware that its moral voice–a voice desperately needed today–has lost a hearing because sex scandals compromise the Church’s credibility. That loss is also an “injustice” with which the Church seems not to reckon.

Perhaps a healthy dose of “the hermeneutic of suspicion”–of proper and robust skepticism–would be a worthwhile corrective to Rome’s seeming self-paralysis about cleaning out its sexual Augean stables. And Sullivan reminds us that those in office have at their disposal uneven power vis-à-vis their critics or opponents. The McCarrick affair exposed the “power imbalance” involving seminarians whose track to ordination is entirely dependent on a bishop. Fr. Boniface Ramsey, who helped blow that scandal wide open, put himself clearly at risk as an ordinary priest reporting on an up-and-coming cardinal-wannabe. Given those facts, the failure to apply a “hermeneutic of suspicion” seems, most charitably, naïve.

With Rome so often acting as if smoke doesn’t necessarily indicate fire until the Pope gets burned (as in the Barros case), a healthier dose of a “hermeneutic of suspicion” could have helped to avoid that.

Catholic World Report