On the necessity for swift and decisive pastoral discipline of priests

A Catholic priest already facing criminal sexual-assault charges in a Texas has been re-arrested and jailed in lieu of $700,000 bail in Dallas County after allegedly seeking a contract hit on the claimed victim, who is also a witness in a related civil case.

Father John Fiala, 52, has now been charged with solicitation to commit capital murder in addition to aggravated sexual assault of a child, according to CNN and the San Antonio Express-News.

An Associated Press article provides additional details.

The articles say Fiala is accused of approaching a neighbor with an offer to kill the unidentified teen. However, the neighbor reportedly blew the whistle and the priest then allegedly offered $5,000 to an undercover agent with the Texas Department of Public Safety for the contract hit on the youth, who is now 18.

A lawyer representing Fiala could not immediately be reached for comment.

This is not the type of news story that I would normally post. But, it does indirectly point out why sometimes justice needs to be quite swift. No, I am not talking about secular justice. I am talking about Church discipline. Too often the attitude of the Church has been to hide wrongdoing rather than deal with wrongdoing. But, inevitably, it can have some serious bad effects, as in the case above. The priest or pastor charged (or maybe never charged) can start believing that they are above any law or canon. The case above shows a priest who has completely lost any perspective and came to believe that he and only he himself was valuable. Other people, particularly those who could defrock him, were not in the least valuable. Of course, the other possibility is that this is a “deep-cover” planted agent of Satan. There are days when I wish to believe that. Sadly, there is enough sin in the human heart that the priest need not be a direct agent of Satan in any way, but simply a human being corrupted by the world, the flesh, and the devil.

But, I will put in a caution. There have been enough innocent people released since the advent of regular DNA testing that we need to make sure that we are differentiating between swift justice and a rush to judgment. Some of the people released were even on death row and within a short time of their execution. There is a Church version of that, and that is murder by rumor, innuendo, and immediate judgment. There have been a few accused priests found innocent when it would come out that their accusers had lied. Sadly, there were the inevitable people interviewed afterward who refused to believe that the priest was innocent and insisted that he be barred from parish work. Those people, of course, are of the rush to judgment variety, don’t let the truth stand in your way.

We also need to differentiate between a swiftness in investigating a crime (or non-criminal violation of the canons) and bringing any charges due, and a swiftly concluded trial. Why do I say that? Our society, whether the Church or the State, always has to remember to balance two principles. On the one hand, we do have the saying about justice delayed being no justice. That encourages us to swiftly bring someone to trial. But, once the trial starts, we want to make sure that the facts do come out, and even more importantly, that the defendant has the opportunity to fully defend themselves. Part of the reason we have long trials in the USA is that theoretically we bend over backwards in order to allow an accused person to defend themselves.

There are those who have been against that type of trial since the 1970’s, when the drumbeat to lower the crime rate began. But, the release of innocents under the advent of DNA testing shows how the people who beat that drum bent our laws and our attitudes so that we became willing to convict based on little, if any, credible evidence. Remember, if they were found innocent by DNA testing, then the evidence had to have been twisted in order to convict them, right? Frankly, there has been nothing sadder than the sick spectacle of the prosecutors in some of those innocence cases who keep on giving interviews about how all they did was follow the evidence, and that their accusations were sound. Bottom line: if you convicted an innocent man to death, you did not follow the evidence and your accusations were not sound, give it up already.

The case of the priest above falls under justice delayed. Fortunately, he is now behind bars and awaiting capital trial. But, remember to maintain a clear difference between being swift to bring someone to judgment and being swift to convict. Those are two very different ideas.