1. Introduction
The clergy abuse crisis presents moral theology with a structural complicity question of unusual analytic depth. The principal wrongs (sexual offences against minors and the vulnerable by clergy and religious leaders) are clear, and their perpetrators are individually liable. But the public charge against the institutional Church is not first that bishops abused. Rather, it is that bishops, vicars, religious superiors, canon lawyers, and diocesan attorneys did things and failed to do things that enabled, concealed, and facilitated the principal wrongs of others. They reassigned offenders, sealed records, declined to denounce, counselled silence, intimidated those who complained, and received morally questionable priests.Footnote 1 Each of these is a specifiable act or omission by a specifiable officeholder in a specifiable role. These specific acts or omissions are what survivors and commentators speak of as the Church’s ‘complicity’ in the crisis. How is a moral theologian to think about distributed institutional complicity of this shape – about an institutional wrong that is not the act of a corporate subject acting as one, but neither the disconnected sum of unrelated individual failures?
In 1946, the Dominican I. Th. Eschmann published in Mediaeval Studies the first of two long articles on ‘Studies on the Notion of Society in St Thomas Aquinas’, subtitled ‘St Thomas and the Decretal of Innocent IV Romana Ecclesia: Ceterum’.Footnote 2 Its central claim is unambiguous: ‘The Little Question of the Scriptum forbids the assumption, in Thomistic thinking, of collective guilt’.Footnote 3 The ‘Little Question’ is Scriptum super Sententiis IV, d. 18, q. 2, a. 3, qa. 2, where Aquinas asks whether a sentence of excommunication can be passed against a whole community (universitas), and answers, following Innocent IV’s 1246 decretal, that it cannot, because actus non est communitatis, sed singularium personarum (an act is not of the community, but of individual persons).Footnote 4 For Eschmann, this text is decisive. It rules out the move that nineteenth-century corporate-realist Thomists like Matthias Joseph Scheeben and Peter Tischleder wished to make from the analogy of original sin to the doctrine of delictum universitatis (the wrongdoing of a community as such).
I argue that Eschmann is right about what he denies, and that what he denies is narrower than it has been taken to be. We will especially examine Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 62, a. 7, where Aquinas enumerates nine ways in which one person can be implicated in another’s act of theft: by command, counsel, consent, flattery, receiving, participation, silence, not preventing, and not denouncing. Recently, Gregory Mellema’s Complicity and Moral Accountability Footnote 5 has included Aquinas’s nine ways as a precursor to modern philosophical discussions on complicity, and I extend that recovery by showing its relevance to the present crisis.
The argument runs in three steps. First, Aquinas does refuse to attribute the same sin uniformly to all members of a community, and this refusal does block corporate-realist or organic accounts of ecclesiology. Second, the denial of collective guilt leaves untouched a great deal of moral terrain that q. 62 a. 7 maps in detail. Even granting that one cannot attribute a single sin to all members of a community, individuals within a community can still be differentially and causally implicated in the sins of others through specifiable acts or omissions. The nine ways supply just such an apparatus of distributed causal complicity, one that does not require, and indeed refuses, the uniform guilt-imputation Eschmann rules out. The convergence of this apparatus with the most rigorous contemporary account of complicity, that of Chiara Lepora and Robert Goodin, extends even to the treatment of culpable ignorance, where Aquinas grounds a standard that the contemporary account adopts without theorising it. Third, the limitation of Aquinas’s taxonomy will be stated, in that the framework is throughout actus-centred. It does not address what Karl Jaspers and Larry May identify – the implication arising from membership and shared identity rather than from specifiable causal contribution. This is a real limit, but it is a limit on Aquinas’s scope, not a refutation of his framework as such.
2. The Eschmann challenge
Eschmann’s article has two principal targets. The theological target is the line of Catholic dogmatic theology, running from the Salmanticenses through Billuart to Scheeben, that interprets original sin as a paradigm case of collective action and collective guilt. On this reading Adam acts not as an individual but as the juridico-moral head of the Gesamtmensch (collective humanity) whose members are each and every one of his descendants; ‘the action of the head is the action of the whole body’.Footnote 6 Scheeben’s Handbuch der katholischen Dogmatik (Handbook of Catholic Dogmatics) uses this notion to render original sin metaphysically intelligible, and the vocabulary of Gesamtperson, Gesamtwille, and Gesamthandlung (collective person, collective will, and collective action) reappears almost verbatim in Otto von Gierke’s Genossenschaftsrecht (Law of Associations), where it serves to construct a ‘Theory of Corporative Realism’ according to which a social group is ‘a living organism and a real person, with body and members and a will of its own’.Footnote 7
Eschmann’s second target is juridical: the line of medieval Romanist jurisprudence, culminating in the Apparatus of Innocent IV, that develops the notion of universitas as a nomen iuris (a category in law rather than a real entity) and treats the impossibility of corporate delict as a metaphysical truth about the abstract corporate essence rather than as an empirical truth about what individuals do as a collective whole. That this is a defensible reading of Aquinas, against the organic-whole interpretation line that runs from Gierke through Tischleder, has been independently argued from within the English Dominican tradition by Thomas Gilby OP, who likewise concludes that Aquinas’s political community is compositio vel ordo (an accidental and not a substantial whole) and that the medieval idea of a corporation in which ‘the principle of unity resided in the members who came together’ should not be confused with the later organic theory of the State.Footnote 8
Aquinas’s distinctive intervention emerges here. Where Innocent and, following him, Albert the Great, locate the impossibility of corporate excommunication in the metaphysical character of the universitas,Footnote 9 Aquinas locates it in the empirical improbability of the delictum universitatis.Footnote 10 The text is worth quoting at length:
Excommunication is only to be inflicted when one has committed a mortal sin. Now a sin consists in an act. Yet, in most cases, an act is not done by the whole community but by some persons (actus autem non est communitatis, sed singularium personarum ut frequenter). Hence these persons from among the community may be excommunicated, but not the community itself. And even if it be that sometimes an act pertain to a whole multitude—for instance, several men pull a ship which no one is able to pull—yet it is not probable that a community consent so entirely to evil that some people do not disagree. And since, as Holy Scripture teaches us, it is not the way of God who is the judge of all the earth to slay the righteous with the wicked, therefore the Church on which it is incumbent to imitate the divine judgment has, very wisely indeed, enacted the statute that ‘a whole community be not excommunicated’, lest, when gathering up the tares, the wheat be rooted out with them.Footnote 11
The argument is at once juridical, philosophical, and theological. Juridically, it appeals to the canon Si habes (a long passage from Augustine’s Letter 250 to Auxilius), which insists that no spiritual punishment can be inflicted on the innocent for the sin of another.Footnote 12 Philosophically, it rests on a doctrine of action: acts are performed by persons, and any common act is, in the original case, the act of all members of the community. Theologically, it appeals to the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt 13:29) and to the gloss commonly attributed to Augustine: princeps et multitudo non est excommunicanda (the prince and the multitude are not to be excommunicated). Eschmann’s decisive philosophical point comes at the close of his article, where he draws on the De Unitate Intellectus (On the Unity of the Intellect) to settle the matter. The community, he argues, is not a substance but an ens rationis practicae (a being of practical reason), a moral order constituted by the practical reason of those who participate in it. To speak of the community itself as the agent of an act is to speak metaphorically; to speak of it as bearing the same guilt as those who actually perform the acts is to speak nonsensically.Footnote 13
Recent scholarship on Aquinas’s account of original guilt has reached a structurally similar conclusion. Daniel Houck has shown that Aquinas’s mature position, that all who descend from Adam can be considered as one human being although they are not in fact metaphysically one, preserves what he calls ‘partial voluntareity’: a thin moral unity that is, in Houck’s phrase, ‘greater than a purely physical relation of descendance, lesser than participation in the action of a universal nature’.Footnote 14 What Houck reconstructs from q. 81 a. 1 in the case of original guilt, the present article reconstructs from q. 62 a. 7 in the case of complicity. However, the taxonomy of the nine ways stands on its own, and does not depend on resolving the contested metaphysics of partial voluntareity in the original-sin case.Footnote 15
It is important to be exact about what Eschmann denies. The target of his article is the corporate-realist claim that the same sin can be imputed uniformly to all members of a community in virtue of their membership. The Tischleder–Scheeben tradition wants this strong claim because it wants original sin to model corporate delict generally: as Adam’s sin is the sin of every descendant, so the sin of a universitas is the sin of every member. Aquinas refuses precisely this move. The Scriptum insists that one cannot attribute the same act uniformly across the community. The community as such is not a substance that acts; it is an order constituted by the acts of its members. Hence the same sin cannot be the sin of each.
This is correct, but what Eschmann denies is quite a specific thesis: uniform attribution of the same sin to the whole community. The denial leaves entirely open a different and much more interesting question – namely, whether individuals within a community can be differentially implicated in the sins of particular others through specific acts of their own. Eschmann’s article does not take up this question; but Aquinas himself does in ST II–II, q. 62, a. 7.
A note on the contemporary stakes of this debate. Eschmann’s reading of Innocent IV’s doctrine of the universitas is not merely an item of intra-Thomistic exegesis. The most influential contemporary work in social ontology, Christian List and Philip Pettit’s Group Agency, has engaged directly with this canonical-juristic tradition; in subsequent work, Pettit cites Eschmann’s 1946 reconstruction by name in the course of defending a realist account of group agents that is nonetheless neither essentialist nor methodologically collectivist.Footnote 16 Recovering the dimension of Aquinas’s thought on complicity that Eschmann’s denial of collective guilt does not touch is, therefore, a project with significance well beyond Thomistic exegesis.
3. The taxonomy Eschmann overlooks
Aquinas’s taxonomy appears not in a treatise on complicity but in the question on restitution, which is itself part of the treatise on the virtue of justice.Footnote 17 This setting is important, as the nine ways are not first a typology of moral involvement in another’s wrong; they are an answer to a specific question of justice – namely, when is a person who is not the principal taker of another’s property nonetheless bound ad restitutionem (to make restitution)? The taxonomy is, in a contemporary register, an enumeration of the conditions under which liability extends beyond the principal agent to those who have stood in some specifiable relation to the principal’s act.
Aquinas distinguishes direct and indirect causes. Direct causes are six: command, counsel, consent, flattery, receiving, and participation. Indirect causes are three: silence, not preventing, and not denouncing. Within the direct causes, Aquinas further distinguishes between those that move the principal to act (command, counsel, consent, and flattery, which Mellema usefully glosses as forms of induction Footnote 18) and those that aid or support the principal in the act itself or its aftermath: receiving and participation. The indirect causes are forms of omission: failures to act when action is required.
The crucial feature of this taxonomy is that it is not a theory of uniform collective guilt. It is the opposite. The taxonomy presupposes that the principal agent is an individual, that the complicit person is another individual, and that the complicit person’s involvement is mediated by a specifiable act or omission of his own. Aquinas is not saying that everyone in the same community as the principal thief is a thief. He is saying that those who commanded, counselled, consented to, flattered, received, participated, were silent when bound to speak, did not prevent when bound to act, or did not denounce when bound to denounce – each of these stands in a specifiable causal relation to the theft, and each is, therefore, implicated in it, in a way that grounds an obligation of restitution. The implication is real but distributed: each complicit person bears a moral weight proportionate to the act or omission he himself performed.
Two features of the taxonomy reinforce this point. First, the taxonomy is causal but not mechanical. Aquinas notes that counsel and flattery do not always give rise to the obligation of restitution: ‘the counsellor or flatterer is bound to restitution only when it may be judged with probability that the unjust taking resulted from such causes’.Footnote 19 The notion of causa efficax (efficient cause) is more capacious than the post-Humean notion of causation: it includes not only the strict counterfactual sense in which I cause something to happen, but the wider sense in which my words or gestures inform and shape the deliberative field of another agent. The same act of speech can be either complicity by counsel (when it tips the principal toward the act) or innocent advice (when it does not). The locus of complicity is not a brute causal contribution (in a modern sense) but a contribution that is taken up into the principal’s deliberation in a way that bends it toward wrong.
Second, the taxonomy is asymmetrical with respect to ability and obligation. The indirect causes (silence, not preventing, and not denouncing) generate liability only when one is able and bound to act.Footnote 20 Not every failure to prevent another’s wrong is complicity in it; the failure must be a failure to discharge a duty one in fact has. The question of complicity by omission is therefore never separable from the question of whose duty it was to act. To ask whether someone is complicit in another’s wrong by silence is already to ask what office, what role, what relation he stood in to the wrong and to its potential prevention. This makes the taxonomy of the indirect causes an ecclesiological tool of considerable discernment. It requires one to specify not only what was done and not done but also who was bound to do what in the respective offices they occupied. Mellema has doubted how much weight the indirect causes can carry, judging that complicity by omission ‘typically does not warrant the ascription of moral responsibility for the outcome, even when the omission is deliberate’.Footnote 21 That judgement holds for the cases he considers, in which the person who kept silent was under no antecedent duty to speak. However, where an office bounds the agent to act in a certain way, Aquinas’s condition is met rather than waived.
None of this is in tension with Eschmann. Eschmann denies that the same sin can be imputed uniformly to all members of a community. The nine ways assert no such thing. They distribute moral involvement differentially across persons, each of whom has performed a specifiable act or omission of their own. What the taxonomy offers, that Eschmann’s narrow focus on collective guilt does not, is the affirmative side of the picture: that distributed causal complicity is real, articulable, and morally weighty.
4. The Lepora–Goodin convergence
The measure of how much philosophical work the nine ways still do is what the most rigorous contemporary account of complicity has independently arrived at. Lepora and Goodin’s On Complicity and Compromise Footnote 22 is a major monograph in analytic moral philosophy, written without reference to Aquinas, that aims to give a systematic account of when an agent who is not the principal wrongdoer becomes implicated in another’s wrong. Read alongside q. 62 a. 7, what is striking is how much it converges with the taxonomy outlined above.
Lepora and Goodin propose what they call the ‘minimal condition’ for complicity: ‘Voluntarily performing an action that contributes to the wrongdoing of another and knowing that it does so (but without necessarily sharing the other’s wrongful purpose) represent the necessary actus and mens conditions, respectively, that are minimally required for one to be complicit’.Footnote 23 This may be seen, as far as it goes, as a plausible reconstruction of what Aquinas means by being a causa of another’s malum, with one important Thomistic gloss. Where Lepora and Goodin require knowledge, Aquinas requires either knowledge or the kind of practical contribution (command, counsel) that presupposes it. Both accounts locate complicity in a voluntary contribution to another’s wrong; both refuse to require that the complicit agent share the principal’s wrongful intent; both treat complicity as a real but distinct moral category from the principal wrong itself.
But the convergence runs deeper than the minimal condition. Lepora and Goodin go on to develop a taxonomy of complicity that distinguishes co-principals (full joint wrongdoing, conspiracy, cooperation) from accessories proper, and within accessory complicity distinguishes complicity simpliciter from connivance, condoning, consorting, and contiguity.Footnote 24 Each of their categories has a recognisable Thomistic correlate. Their co-principals are Aquinas’s participatio (participation). Their accessories proper map onto his iussio (command), consilium (counsel), consensus (consent), palpo (flattery), and receptus (receiving). Their connivance is his non obstans (not preventing); their condoning, his mutus (silence) and non manifestans (not denouncing). Their consorting and contiguity, while not exact correlates, fall within the territory mapped by his discussion of when receptus (receiving) and silence become culpable. Even their formula for measuring the degree of complicity, which is a function of the badness of the principal wrongdoing, the responsibility of the secondary agent, the extent of causal contribution, and the extent of shared purpose,Footnote 25 partially reconstructs in modern dress what Aquinas does when he insists that counsel and flattery generate restitution only when they are causae efficaces, that not preventing generates liability only when one is able and bound to prevent, and so on.Footnote 26
The convergence even extends to the treatment of ignorance. The minimal condition quoted above requires that the complicit agent know that his action contributes to another’s wrongdoing, and Aquinas does not always require knowledge. If ignorance results from prior negligence, from a failure to learn what one could and should have learned, it supplies no excuse. The knowledge clause is not, however, Lepora and Goodin’s final word. When they restate their minimum conditions in full, the epistemic element becomes ‘knowledge or culpable ignorance of the contributory role of one’s actions’, together with ‘knowledge or culpable ignorance of the wrongfulness of the other’s act to which one is contributing’.Footnote 27 Hence, in their account, unavoidable ignorance excuses. But an agent who both could have known and should have known what his action was serving is guilty of culpable ignorance, and he is responsible for it and for the consequences that flow from it.Footnote 28 The charge can survive even wilful ignorance and reckless disregard, as with a dealer who sells explosives to all comers and makes no enquiries whatsoever.Footnote 29
Aquinas gives the account of this standard of epistemic negligence that goes beyond Lepora and Goodin. In the treatise on human acts he asks whether there can be voluntariness without any act, and answers that there can. The voluntary is what proceeds from the will, and it proceeds from the will in two ways: directly, when the will acts, and indirectly, when the will fails to act although it was able and bound to act, as the helmsman causes the shipwreck by ceasing to steer.Footnote 30 Ignorance is governed by the same rule. It excuses only when it is not itself voluntary.Footnote 31 Ignorance that an agent cultivates so that he may sin more freely, the ignorantia affectata, is directly voluntary, and it increases his guilt instead of excusing it.Footnote 32 Ignorance that arises from negligence, because the agent failed to acquire knowledge he was able and bound to acquire, is indirectly voluntary, and it diminishes culpability without removing it.Footnote 33 What Lepora and Goodin express as ‘could and should have known’ is, in Aquinas, the voluntarium indirectum applied to knowledge. A recent study by Nicholas Ogle has pressed the point further. For Aquinas, negligent ignorance inculpates even when the agent never chose to remain ignorant, because ‘not thinking about it’ is itself voluntary whenever it was in the agent’s power to think about it, to will it, and to do it.Footnote 34
Lepora and Goodin leave this standard ungrounded: ‘We do not pretend to have resolved any of those issues here. Here we merely acknowledge them’.Footnote 35 They also treat the two knowledge variables concerning ignorance as ‘off–on’, so that the standard is either met or it is not met.Footnote 36 Aquinas explains why the standard holds, because the failure to know is itself voluntary in the indirect mode. And he specifies whose ignorance is culpable. What an agent is bound to know depends on his office, for there are things a physician or a priest must know because without them the due act of the office cannot be rightly exercised.Footnote 37 The duty to know is, therefore, distributed exactly as the duty to act was to be distributed.Footnote 38 A bishop’s ignorance is measured against what his office required him to know, just as his silence is measured against what his office required him to say. On this point Aquinas supplies the account of voluntariness that the contemporary theory’s epistemic clause presupposes.
I do not press this convergence to claim that Lepora and Goodin are crypto-Thomists, or that nothing has been added in the intervening eight centuries. They have added a great deal, in particular by developing and extending the analysis of complicity to more structural and social contexts (humanitarian intervention, professional collaboration with unjust regimes) that Aquinas does not contemplate. Nevertheless, the fact that the most sustained contemporary analytic effort to give a systematic account of complicity has important convergences with Aquinas’s taxonomy is worth noting. The implication for Eschmann’s denial of collective guilt is straightforward. Whatever Eschmann’s denial does to the Tischleder programme, and it does a great deal, it does not touch the framework of distributed causal complicity that q. 62 a. 7 supplies. That framework remains live, productive, and (as the convergence with Lepora and Goodin shows) in genuine continuity with the best contemporary moral philosophy of the phenomenon.
5. The limits of an actus-centred account
It would be misleading to leave this picture without acknowledging what Aquinas’s framework does not give us. The nine ways are throughout an actus-centred analysis. Each category picks out a specifiable act or omission of the complicit person. The implication is therefore always traceable: the complicit person is implicated because of what he did or did not do. This is the framework’s strength and its limit.
There are forms of moral implication the nine ways do not reach. The most pressing is the question of ‘German guilt’ that Karl Jaspers raised in 1947, and that Larry May has developed in Sharing Responsibility.Footnote 39 Jaspers asked how we should think about the moral condition of ordinary German citizens after the Second World War who in many cases had no opportunity to prevent or denounce the acts committed by the Third Reich, and who were not, on any standard forensic accounting, criminally guilty. His answer was a fourfold typology of guilt (criminal, political, moral, and metaphysical), of which the last is genuinely new: a guilt arising not from any specifiable act or omission but from the bare fact of shared humanity with those who acted, and from the loves, dispositions, and patterns of attention one has carried as a member of the community whose acts these were. May has extended this to communities short of the political: a member of an institution whose culture has facilitated harm is implicated in that culture even when no specific act of his can be cited as a causal contribution. The implication runs through identity and shared habitus (habituated disposition), not through causation.
Aquinas does not address this register. The nine ways are causal throughout. Even the indirect causes (silence, not preventing, and not denouncing) are causal in the wider Aristotelian sense: they implicate the agent because of what he did not do when he was bound to act. None of this picks out the kind of dispositional, identity-based, non-causal implication May and Jaspers describe.
It can seem that this second register simply reinstates, under an existential name, the uniform guilt-imputation that Eschmann showed Aquinas to forbid. Yet it does not, for two reasons. The first is that Eschmann’s question was juridical. The Scriptum asks whether a whole community may be excommunicated, which is to ask whether a penalty may fall on every member for a sin that only some committed, and Aquinas answers that it may not, because a spiritual penalty inflicted on the innocent for the sin of another slays the righteous with the wicked. Metaphysical guilt makes no claim of that kind. Jaspers assigns each of his four guilts its own tribunal. Crimes are judged by courts, political guilt by the victor, moral guilt by one’s own conscience, and metaphysical guilt by God alone.Footnote 40 Because no human tribunal has jurisdiction over it, metaphysical guilt grounds no excommunication, no punishment, and no restitution.
The second reason is that the implications of this existential register differ from the implications of the nine ways. May is explicit that membership alone creates nothing, for ‘it is not mere membership that creates responsibility, but how one reacts (behaviorally or attitudinally) to the groups of which one is a member’.Footnote 41 He faults Jaspers for coming close, at moments, to a guilt of mere being.Footnote 42 Responsibility on his account is scalar, rising and falling with each member’s attitudes, omissions, and responses.Footnote 43 For members who contributed nothing causally, the fitting response is shame, which attaches to who one is, and shame differs from guilt, which attaches to what one has done.Footnote 44 The currency of the two registers differs accordingly. The nine ways assign liability, and liability answers to restitution and to punishment. The existential register issues a summons, and the summons answers to self-examination and to the remaking of the loves and habits that bind one to their communal identity. Corporate realism imputed one and the same guilt to every member in virtue of membership. The existential account of Jaspers and May does not concern judicial guilt as such. The two perspectives are compatible with each other, and both are compatible with Eschmann’s denial, because each answers a question the other does not ask.
This should be seen as a limitation on Aquinas’s scope, not a refutation of his framework itself. The nine ways do not exhaust everything that needs to be said about how individuals are morally implicated in the wrongs of others. They do, however, cover a large share of what needs to be said about the causal dimension of that implication. The Church’s complicity in the abuse crisis certainly has structural and existential dimensions, but it also has specific causal dimensions. Specific bishops failed to denounce, specific superiors reassigned offenders, and specific officials were silent when bound to speak. The non-causal dispositional and identity-based dimensions of these wrongs are real and require their own analysis, but they sit on top of a substratum of distributed causal complicity that the nine ways analyse with clarity. To address the latter without ever reaching the former is partial; to claim that one can address the former while ignoring the latter is evasion of responsibility.
6. Conclusion
Eschmann’s reading of the Scriptum establishes that Aquinas refuses to attribute the same sin uniformly to all members of a community, and this refusal does deny a simplistic attribution of collective guilt across the entire community. But as we have seen above, Aquinas does not deny that individuals can be differentially and causally implicated in the sins of particular others through specifiable acts of their own. We have surveyed ST II–II, q. 62, a. 7, where the nine ways set out a precise apparatus of distributed causal complicity. The continuing relevance of this apparatus is evidenced by the fact that the most rigorous contemporary causal account of complicity, that of Lepora and Goodin, arrives independently at something close to what Aquinas set out. Yet Aquinas’s framework is, throughout, actus-centred. It does not address the further register of non-causal, dispositional, identity-based complicity that Jaspers and May have charted.
For the case with which we began, the nine ways give us the apparatus to consider ways in which individual actors can bear complicity for cases of abuse. The bishop who instructed that an offender be reassigned commits iussio (command). The canon lawyer or diocesan attorney who counselled non-disclosure commits consilium (counsel), generating restitution where the counsel functioned as a causa efficax in the principal’s deliberation. The chancery official who acquiesced in such decisions commits consensus (consent); the apologist who praised the offending priest or framed complainants as embittered commits palpo (flattery). The diocese or religious order that knowingly received an offender transferred from another jurisdiction commits receptus (receiving); those who actively helped reassign offenders or finance settlements designed to purchase silence commit participatio (participation). The official silent at the meeting where action could have been taken, where his office bound him to speak, commits mutus (silence).Footnote 45 The bishop with both authority and knowledge who failed to remove a priest from ministry commits non obstans (not preventing). The bishop who remained ignorant only because he neglected the inquiries his office bound him to make gains no excuse from that ignorance, for negligent ignorance is itself voluntary.Footnote 46 And where the ignorance was cultivated, so that records went unread and complainants unheard, it increases his guilt.Footnote 47 The canonical or civil official who failed to report when bound by law to do so commits non manifestans (not denouncing).
Each category picks out a specific act or omission of a specific person in a specific role at a specific time, and each generates real liability for the officeholder responsible. None requires the uniform attribution of guilt to ‘the Church’ and its members. What the framework supplies, which the diffuse public vocabulary of ‘systemic failure’ may sometimes obscure, is the analytic resolution of structural complicity into the named conduct of named persons in named offices, without losing the structural character of what is named. The further register of dispositional and identity-based implication is real and demands its own analysis, but it takes nothing away from what Aquinas already supplies, which is more than the literature has generally recognised.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my supervisors, Robert Song and Samuel Tranter, for their guidance and encouragement.
AI statement
In accordance with Cambridge University Press policy on the use of AI tools, the author declares the following. An AI assistant (Anthropic’s Claude) was used to support the editing of the manuscript, specifically: checking spelling and grammar; suggesting stylistic refinements; and assisting with the formatting of footnotes to journal style (including conversion to single quotation marks, application of British punctuation conventions, addition of p./pp. prefixes to page references). All substantive scholarly content – the argument, the textual exegesis of Aquinas, the engagement with Eschmann and the secondary literature, and the construction of the case – are the author’s own. All citations were verified by the author.
Declaration of interest
The author declares no competing interests.
Funding statement
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Northern Bridge Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (grant numbers 2887629 and AH/R012415/1).
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