Photo Courtesy of Hacking Christianity
Toxic Secret Door
Special to United Methodist Insight
As I understand it, secrecy in the midst of a case like Bishop Minerva Carcaño's is legally to keep her and the accusers from being publicly shamed or defamed. I am pretty sure that if she spoke out against her accusers outside of the hearings, she would be vulnerable to lawsuits for defamation if she embellished her telling beyond the actual facts of the allegations. Defense lawyers would discourage her from ever attempting to discuss the facts in public. As some accused persons have attempted to defend themselves through the media, she could hurt her own reputation, as Rev. Thomas Frank indicated in Heather Hahn's recent article.
The Church has not always been so silent about allegations against clergy. Someone on the cabinet sometimes leaked the allegations as a means of establishing a shunning. Rumors about a pastor were successful in isolating the accused. The allegations could be for incompetence or ineffectiveness but that degree of charges was not as important as satisfying what some key power person, usually the bishop, felt about the clergy person.
Church leaders sometimes leaked the allegations to completely "poison the well" so no hearing group could be objective.
As you can tell, the underbelly of the Church can be pretty awful. And I am not even talking about the harm caused by racism and sexism you all know about. I am talking about the unaccountable power that does that.
In Bishop Carcaño's case, both sides have done an amazing job of keep things confidential. If anything like it occurred before, it was so successful that I never heard of it in my forty plus years of observing personnel practices.
The law attempts to level playing fields. And, as I've speculated, civil law is close enough to this case to encourage all parties to play it straight. Confidentiality by all parties tends to be the best policy for all concerned.
History of complaint process
Let me do a little reminding of our history of handling complaints. Back in the 1980s and early 1990s, GCFA was stuck with some huge legal bills because of lawsuits, It wasn't only because of sexual misconduct that brought suits against the Church. Bishops and other conference officials were abusing the then-new cabinet-initiated leave of absence. That led to the development of the concept of fair-process in 1992. The following quadrennium introduced mediation and "just resolution."
In the uneven power relationship between cabinet and clergy, some cabinets found ways to minimize hearings where fair process had to be applied. Using the coercion of requesting a voluntary leave of absence or a church trial during the "supervisory response," cabinet members could unload themselves of working with clergy they looked upon as troubled. Instead of trying to redeem the situation and support their colleagues in ministry, some cabinets took the easy and cruel route of dumping clergy using intimidation when they could.
If the pastors refused and fought for fair process rights, the cards were still stacked against them (are still stacked against them) because the cabinet held in its hands the careers of the members of the Board of Ordained Ministry and of all the hearing and appeal bodies within the conference that were to deal with the complaint.
When pastors were attacked by "clergy killers" and "antagonists in the church," cabinets were more likely to collaborate against the pastor than try to solve the real problem of church members undermining their pastors. "The customer is always right" seemed to be the prevailing attitude. Cabinets tended to pick new superintendents, not from the older and wiser pastors approaching retirement with no particular personal ambitions, but from the younger, up-and-coming pastors willing to please the bishop. Such superintendents were the most vulnerable to being triangulated into that collusion against the pastor.
Complaints were seen as disruptions of cabinet members' very busy schedules and not projects to be learned from and used to help everyone be more respectful and appropriate in their Christian work together. Thus, the administrative culture of personnel work by cabinets could, without care, slip off into blaming pastors and misusing the processes, especially "supervisory response" and "just resolution," for cabinet members to continue using intimidation, coercion, and misrepresentation to talk the accused clergy into voluntarily leaving ministry, one way or another.
Instead of following Paragraph 334.3 which directs superintendents to work with a troubled pastor to overcome any lapses, instead of considering identifying the people out to get the pastor and challenging them, some cabinet members tended to view the pastor as the problem.
A word about "just resolution": It was intended to be handled by professional mediators who searched out all the affected people beside the accused to be involved in helping overcome the complaint and bring everyone together back into the community if possible. In practice, the bishop or his/her agent ran the show and minimized the participants in the negotiations. Since most church leaders think of themselves as upright Christian personages unlikely to do anything wrong, and in fact thinking they were trying to serve the best interests of the pastor and the Church, they ignored the possibility that they could be handling the complaint and its resolution wrong. In the power imbalance of the situation, it took Judicial Council Decision 1383 to raise questions about the validity of these processes.
As I've said before, it usually takes a lawsuit to really change anything, so little has changed from "the bishop knows best" attitude that has framed the use of personnel practices.
Power imbalance
Over against that background of process between cabinet members and clergy, think with me about the situation where the power imbalance is much less, where bishops are to square off against one another over a complaint about one of them.
Just from a power perspective alone, for all her being an ethnic woman, Bishop Carcaño is still a bishop accustomed to the position of "knowing best" and of being protected by her colleagues from all the complaints every bishop faces these days. She would be tempted (remember we are speculating here) to believe she did not make any mistakes. She would be tempted to believe all her actions were within the scope of her authority as a bishop. Her jurisdictional colleagues would very likely have gone along with that in order to allow them to feel okay about questionable decisions they may have made. I have watched bishops do things that I thought caused major harm to the church and got away with it. Not even financial shenanigans rose to sufficient heights to get them removed from office. About the only things that have moved the needle at all are complaints about sexual affairs and lawsuits.
We've been assured there are no sexual issues of any kind involved in Bishop Carcaño's complaints.
So a person with such sense of being as Bishop Carcaño has shown before Congress and the world in her advocacy, it is hard for me to imagine her being intimidated by her fellow bishops. If she could face lawsuits for her actions, she surely would not want to let the Church just find her guilty of anything that might then be used in a civil suit against her.
I've seen other strong individuals under complaint become public about their innocence and even deny the allegations specifically enough for everyone to know what the complaints were. I've seen bishops handling the complaints be very public as part of their strategy to defeat to accused bishop.
In such high-powered circumstances, I have seen the parties on both sides make mistakes and do things that ended up against their own best interests. Even in circumstances like these where the silence is deafening, I can imagine the dynamics are very potent underneath the cover of confidentiality from both sides. I can also imagine these struggles causing the lengthening of the suspension, the real bone of contention with those folks most concerned about bias being involved.
I bring all this into the conversation with you so that as you consider your report about bias, you do not overlook power. It is an underlying dynamic which may explain some of what is happening in this case.
The Rev. Jerry Eckert, retired from the Wisconsin Annual Conference, wrote this response based on years of work with Associates in Advocacy (AIA). While he is an emeritus member of AIA, he does not represent them or speak for them. AIA was formed to support those who are called to be advocates for pastors and laity facing the complaint processes of the United Methodist Church.