There are moments when a single word becomes a moral act.

No.

Not the lazy “no” of cynicism or disengagement. Not the performative “no” of social media. The real “no” — the one spoken when you know it will cost you something. The one spoken when power expects your silence. The one spoken because a human being is being treated as disposable, and you refuse to accept it as normal.

Cardinal Joseph Tobin’s recent willingness to say “no” to the brutal immigration enforcement tactics being used in the United States — clearly, publicly, and without the usual ecclesial hedging — matters. I want to say that plainly at the outset.

In a time when many religious leaders are tempted to baptize cruelty with “order” or to treat human suffering as a political football, it takes courage for a cardinal to look at a machine that is hurting people and name it for what it is. It takes courage to align the Church’s public voice with the Gospel’s stubborn insistence that every person has dignity that cannot be revoked by paperwork, uniforms, or slogans.

And, yes, it felt like an echo of something older and better in American religious life: leaders in the 1960s who understood that faith is not proven by how politely we speak, but by whether we will stand near the suffering when it is unpopular to do so. In those decades, “religion” was not meant to be a soothing soundtrack to injustice. It was supposed to be an interruption.

So, I am willing — more than willing — to congratulate Cardinal Tobin for that clarity. New Jersey (and everywhere else) needs clergy and bishops who can still speak like Catholics (we have a few, we need more) and not like risk managers.

But I need to say the next part with the same clarity: the United States also needs Cardinal Tobin, along with all bishops and cardinals, to bring the Church’s ongoing clerical abuse litigation to a victim-centered, survivor-focused end.

Because if “no” means anything at all, it must mean “no” here, too.

No to delay.

No to procedural cruelty.

No to survivors being treated like hostile parties to be exhausted.

No to a legal strategy that may win motions but loses souls.

And, yes, no to the quiet message survivors hear when the Church can mobilize moral language for one crisis, while allowing lawyers to grind down the people whose lives were shattered inside Church walls.  That strategy has always failed, it will continue to fail today and, in the future, and it will find itself in history’s deep and ignoble unmarked grave of discarded lies.

I am a Catholic layman. I am also a survivor. I did not choose this identity; it was forced on me. I did not wake up one day and decide that the defining fact of my life would be what a powerful cleric did to me when I was young. But here I am (and here we are) still dealing with the consequences.

December 1, 2019, was not just another date. For thousands of survivors, it was the day a locked door finally opened. It was the day many people could walk into a courthouse without being told, “Too late. You waited too long,” as if trauma runs on the same schedule as a tax filing.

Opening that door was supposed to mean something. It was supposed to be a societal admission that, when institutions hide abuse, the statute of limitations becomes a second weapon — not against perpetrators, but against the harmed.

And yet, years later, so many survivors still feel the same exhaustion that comes from living inside a system designed to outlast us.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the Church knows how to act decisively when it wants to. It knows how to assemble resources, deploy messaging, coordinate leadership, and speak with force. It knows how to move quickly when the stakes are reputational or political.

So, when survivors watch the slow churn of litigation, the constant friction, and the sense that the Church’s posture is still fundamentally defensive, it communicates something. Even if no one says it out loud.

It communicates: We will address you on our timeline, in our way, under our conditions.

But the Gospel does not recognize “our conditions” when the subject is justice. The Gospel recognizes wounds. The Gospel recognizes the scandal of harming the vulnerable — and the deeper scandal of treating their pain as an inconvenience to manage.

This is why I am asking Cardinal Tobin and all bishops and cardinals to treat survivor justice with the same moral seriousness they have shown elsewhere.

If ICE raids and detention regimes deserve a public “no” (and they certainly do in the violent, haphazard format we have seen), then so does the survivor experience of being put through years of adversarial processes: depositions, delays, motions, sealed documents, and the cold logic of “liability exposure.”

Because survivors are not “exposure.” We are not “claims.”

We are people the Church was supposed to protect.

And situations that have arisen from clergy abuse are not lacking opportunities for decisive leadership. In fact, the present moment is practically begging for it.

In New Jersey, for example, the long-delayed effort to investigate clergy abuse through a grand jury process has fought its way back into motion thanks to forward-looking administration in some areas of the state. Seton Hall’s handling of abuse-related documents and investigations has become a public controversy that will not simply go away with a press statement. Survivors, advocates, journalists, and lawmakers are not going to stop asking what the Church knew, when it knew it, and why accountability still seems to arrive only when courts force it.

Bishops and cardinals who find themselves facing similar pressures can respond to this reality in one of two ways:

1. They can treat it primarily as a threat, something to contain, manage, and survive. This would be foolish, and it will end in failure while undermining the witness of the Church.

OR

1. They can treat it as a summons, a demand for conversion in one of primary places conversion matters: in the Church’s concrete behavior toward the wounded. This would be Catholic theology and faith in action.

We know now that Church leaders, like Cardinal Tobin, have the courageous capacity for the latter.

A survivor-centered end does not mean the Church “surrenders” because, ultimately, the Church is called to be on the side of the wronged and injured, particularly when the injury happened at its own hands. Instead, it means the Church finally stops fighting the wrong battle and allies itself with survivors.

It means that dioceses stop acting like the goal is to minimize cost and maximize control and, instead, commit to a process that prioritizes speed, dignity, truth-telling, and restorative, reparative justice.

So let me be direct about what “victim-centered” should look like — not in slogans, but in action.

First: Dioceses should make public, time-bound commitments to resolve these cases without dragging survivors through endless litigation. If that requires a structured mediation framework, then build it. If it requires an independent process with real authority, then authorize it. If it requires a settlement posture that is genuinely designed to end this, then do it.

Second: Dioceses should stop using tactics that retraumatize. No more “deny and delay” posture that treats survivors as opponents to be broken. No more posture that feels like an institution placing its own comfort above a person’s healing.

Third: Dioceses should practice radical transparency where it matters. No more, “we take this seriously” language, but actual disclosure, actual answers, actual cooperation. If there are documents that should have been released years ago, release them. If there are internal findings that were buried, unbury them. If there are leaders who mishandled allegations, stop circling the wagons around them.

Fourth: Dioceses should remove the culture of silence from the settlement process. Survivors should not feel pressured into secrecy as the price of being made whole. The Church’s instinct for confidentiality has often protected institutions more than it has protected people.

Fifth: Diocesan leaders should meet survivors — not as a photo-op, not as a listening session with pre-approved questions — but as bishops and cardinals who understands that the credibility crisis is ultimately a pastoral crisis. When survivors say, “I don’t know where else to turn,” that is not rhetoric. That is what spiritual abandonment feels like.

Cardinal Tobin and many other Church leaders have shown that they can speak like pastors when human dignity is on the line. They have shown that they are willing to risk criticism to say “no” to injustice. They have done the right thing, and I pray that they will continue to do it.

Now I am asking them to bring that same courage home.

Because places dealing with clerical abuse are not abstract “issues.” They are where we live and where the Church’s credibility has been burned into the public memory. They are where survivors still drive past buildings and parishes and schools and think: That happened there. And I am still carrying it. And I always will be.

The Church does not need survivors to become quiet in order to move forward. Instead, Church leadership needs to become honest and walk with survivors.

Dioceses do not need survivors to accept symbolic gestures. They need a plan that ends this in a way that centers the people who were harmed.

They do not need another committee. They need decisions.

And if Church leaders can say “no” to a lawless machine that harms immigrants, then they can also say “no” to the legal machine that harms survivors a second time.

This is not a request for perfection. It is a request for moral alignment.

A Church that wants to defend the dignity of migrants must also defend the dignity of those abused within its own house.

A Church that wants to speak prophetically to the state must also repent concretely within its own structures.

A Church that wants to invoke the courage of the 1960s must also remember that courage is not only what you say, but also what you do when the cameras are gone and the lawyers are in the room.

Cardinal Tobin and all those who have spoken against recent injustices, I thank you for your courage to speak — now it is time to speak the whole truth and advance the interests of actual justice by more than halves — it is time to get the job done for the Church’s victims.

We need you to lead the Church to the kind of ending survivors can live with, one that is not a technical ending, not a public relations ending, but a human ending that reflects the Gospel’s insistence that the wounded are not obstacles to the Church’s mission — they are the reason the Church exists at all.

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Image: “2024-02-03_14-19-05_ILCE-7C_DSC18881_Kir” (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Miguel Discart & Kiri Karma