When the Church acts on what it knows: accountability as justice in action

Justice is not merely a legal concept. In the Thomistic tradition, justice is the habitual disposition to render to each person what they are owed — including the truth, including protection, including the candid acknowledgment that harm occurred. When Cardinal Blase Cupich wrote to parishioners at St. Francis of Assisi Parish on Chicago's Near West Side on May 9, 2026, removing Father Jose Molina from ministry and reporting the allegations to civil authorities, he was performing an act of justice in the precise sense Aquinas describes in the Summa Theologiae: giving each party — the accused, the accusers, the parish community — what the situation morally required.

Two cases, reported within 24 hours of each other, provide an unusually clear window into how Catholic institutional accountability either does or does not function according to the cardinal virtue of justice. One case involves alleged inappropriate communications with minors and adult women. The other involves the alleged theft of over 60,000 private diocesan financial records. Different categories of harm, yet the same structural question: does the institution see the harm, name it publicly, and act without delay?

Naming the harm as an act of truthfulness

Justice has several sub-virtues in the Catholic Christian tradition, and the one most immediately at work in both of these cases is truthfulness — the disposition to represent reality accurately, neither minimizing nor exaggerating, neither concealing nor exposing gratuitously. Cupich's letter did not traffic in euphemism. It named 'improper and inappropriate conversations and communications with minors and adult women,' directed Molina back to his provincial house, removed his faculties, and stated plainly that the archdiocese had reported the allegations to civil authorities.

That last step is not administrative procedure. It is a moral commitment. When the Aparecida document, produced by the Latin American and Caribbean bishops in 2007, described the Church's responsibility to move beyond reductions to mere political or institutional self-protection, it was articulating exactly the disposition that truthfulness-as-justice demands[^1]: the institution must be willing to see itself clearly, including its failures, and to act accordingly. A bishop who reports an allegation to civil authorities before the outcome of an internal investigation is signaling that the Church does not claim jurisdictional immunity over what are potentially civil or criminal matters.

This is not a small thing. For decades, the default institutional response was the one Pope Francis described in a 2023 interview: concealment, reassignment, the management of scandal rather than the adjudication of harm[^2]. Francis was direct that a 3 percent rate of abuse among Catholic clergy, while proportionally smaller than the 40 to 42 percent that occurs within families and neighborhoods according to UNICEF data he cited, carries a heavier moral weight precisely because of the nature of priestly vocation[^2]. A priest who exploits the pastoral relationship has committed what Francis called a blasphemy — not merely a professional failure, but a rupture at the level of vocation itself.

The structure of institutional justice

The second case adds a different dimension. Las Cruces Bishop Peter Baldacchino's May 8 letter to parishioners at the Basilica of San Albino described a civil discovery process that revealed Father Chris Williams and certain employees allegedly conspired to steal over 60,000 private diocesan records, specifically financial documents. Baldacchino relieved Williams of all duties and suspended him as pastor, referred the matter to law enforcement, and acknowledged that the alleged theft 'exposed the diocese and all parishes to a significant risk of misappropriation and theft.'

Notice what Baldacchino's letter did not do. It did not suggest that the investigation's ongoing status required silence about the nature of the allegation. It named the scale of the alleged crime — 60,000 files is not an abstraction — and it told parishioners honestly that their financial data was at risk. This is justice as fairness: giving the affected community the information they need to understand their own situation.

The parallel with Cupich's letter is instructive. Both letters are addressed to specific parish communities. Both name the specific individual removed. Both report to civil authorities and acknowledge the ongoing character of the investigation. This is a procedural pattern consistent with what the CCMMP describes as the justice-truthfulness sub-virtue: a disposition not merely to avoid lying but to actively construct the conditions in which others can perceive reality accurately.

What the parish community is owed

The hardest question in cases like these is what the parish community itself is owed — both practically and morally. Parishioners at St. Francis of Assisi had a pastoral relationship with Father Molina. Parishioners at the Basilica of San Albino had financial records held by their diocese. In both cases, the institution's action was partly directed at restoring a relationship of trust that had been fractured, not merely at managing the individual accused.

This is where justice intersects with the other cardinal virtues in the Catholic Christian account of the person. Prudence is required to calibrate disclosure: how much to say, when, and to whom, without either suppressing necessary information or conducting a public trial before the facts are established. Courage is required to act despite the relational costs — Cupich's letter removed a priest from a community that had presumably formed genuine bonds with him; Baldacchino's letter named a pastor's alleged crime to the congregation he served. Temperance is required to hold the institutional response within the limits of proportionality, neither minimizing nor sensationalizing.

The Aparecida document noted that Latin American Catholic communities had, over decades, 'strengthened responsibility and vigilance with respect to the truths of the Faith, gaining in depth and serenity of communion'[^1]. That phrase — serenity of communion — names the goal toward which institutional accountability is ordered. It is not the elimination of conflict or the suppression of scandal. It is a community that has learned to process reality with enough shared honesty that trust can survive disclosure.

The peak insight: accountability is a form of love

Here is the claim that the current moment forces into the open: when a bishop writes a letter to a parish community naming an allegation against their priest and reporting it to civil authorities, he is not betraying the Church. He is practicing one of the most demanding expressions of institutional love — the love that refuses to protect the institution at the expense of the persons the institution exists to serve. The CCMMP's account of the human person as created, fallen, and redeemable insists that persons in every role, including ordained ministry, remain subject to the conditions of fallenness: concupiscence, the disordering of appetite, the capacity for serious moral failure. Institutional structures that pretend otherwise do not protect persons; they expose them to worse harm.

Francis, in his 2023 interview, described beginning to listen personally to survivors of abuse when he travels, a practice started by Benedict XVI[^2]. This is not symbolic. It is an act of justice-as-presence: rendering to the harmed person the acknowledgment that their experience is real, that it matters, and that the institution bearing responsibility for the harm is willing to hear it without filtering it first through legal or reputational concerns.

Accompaniment after disclosure

Both letters mention structures of accompaniment. Cupich noted that accusers were offered the services of the archdiocese's Office of Assistance Ministry. This matters pastorally and anthropologically. The person who has experienced harm from a trusted pastoral figure does not simply need the harmful relationship terminated — they need an active, ongoing encounter with the institution that is now offering repair rather than concealment. This is what the CCMMP would describe as movement within the Redeemed state: not the erasure of what happened, but the transformation of its ongoing effects through genuine accompaniment.

The Office of Assistance Ministry is not mentioned as a public relations gesture in Cupich's letter. It is mentioned as a concrete offering to specific people who came forward. That specificity is what distinguishes genuine institutional justice from performative accountability. The question for any institution, Catholic or otherwise, is not whether it has policies but whether those policies are activated for the actual person in front of it.

In both Chicago and New Mexico, two bishops appear to have answered that question correctly. Whether every subsequent step in each investigation maintains that standard remains to be seen. But the letters themselves — specific, direct, reported to civil authorities, offered to affected communities within days of the relevant determinations — are the institutional equivalent of what Aquinas called the first act of justice: the willingness to see the other as someone to whom something is owed.

That willingness, when it holds, is what makes a community capable of the serenity Aparecida described: not the absence of failure, but the presence of truth.

References

1. Documento Conclusivo de Aparecida (2007). Aparecida Final Document. Mirada de los Discipulos Misioneros sobre la Realidad. — 'strengthened responsibility and vigilance with respect to the truths of the Faith, gaining in depth and serenity of communion.'
2. Papa Francisco, entrevistado por Jorge Fontevecchia (2023). Entrevista 2023. — 'es una blasfemia si vos estas llamado como cura o monja a ayudar a esta persona para buscar a Dios.'