Bishop Skylstad, as president of the USCCB, recently named a new chairman and added some new members for the National Review Board (Catholic News Service story on Catholic Online). The new chairman is federal district court judge Michael Merz, and the new members are Robert Kohm (state Supreme Court justice), Emmet Kenney (psychiatrist), Susan Steibe-Pasalich (clinical psychologist), and Diane Knight (retired, career social worker, and former director of Catholic Charities Milwaukee). I don't know much about any of these people (though I find it interesting that Knight appears to be a Democratic supporter, having donated money to the Democratic National Committee in 2005, based on a search at Political Money Line). I also continue to be interested by the kinds of people who are named to this board. This does not necessarily have anything to do with the people named to the board themselves. However, their professions seem to be interesting indicators of how the bishops believe the clergy abuse scandal should be addressed, and thus of how the bishops conceive of this problem in the first place. The latest group of appointees is consistent with the membership of the board up to this point, which has been dominated by lawyers and to a lesser extent psychological professionals, as well as including others with backgrounds in social work, medicine, and university administration. These are certainly the kind of people our secular society accepts as experts, and even universal experts in a sense, but is our society's view of reality, and specifically of the human person, consistent with a Catholic understanding?

On a related point, from the beginning we have heard statements from the review board and from the bishops themselves about addressing the clergy abuse scandal that are based on the ways of thinking found in corporate America. In the article I linked to above, the new chairman of the review board is quoted as saying: "Our present goals are to complete the 'causes and context' study, to audit charter programs in place to ensure they are effective and to recommend to the bishops best practices in implementing the charter." Take out the word "bishops" and replace it with "managers" or something like that, and this statement could come from any corporate bureaucracy. It seems to me that at a minimum these kinds of approaches imply that this is fundamentally a technical problem with a technical solution, a problem that can be dealt with through processes and systems, in other words in a fundamentally mechanistic way. This is problematic not only because it reduces the nature of the problem, but also because within all the techniques and systems and processes there inevitably are hidden substantive assumptions about the nature of the problem. Mentioning the causes and context study also raises another related question. Why is the John Jay College of Criminal Justice doing a study of causes and contexts of the clergy abuse problems? I could understand to a degree why such an institution could be seen as an appropriate choice to do the initial study on the scope of the problem, although I personally thought even that study was flawed. But what is already assumed about the nature of the clergy abuse problem when the review board entrusts John Jay College of Criminal Justice with the study of the context and causes that lay behind this tragic scandal?