In January 1978, an official of the Diocese of Springfield, Illinois, wrote a memo to Bishop Joseph McNicholas. A senior Army chaplain had telephoned to report that a retiring chaplain seeking a post in the diocese, Father Alvin Campbell, “has a moral problem with boys/young men.” Less than a month later, the bishop named Campbell pastor of a parish.

Who is accountable when an institution is told of a danger and proceeds as if it had not been? Institutional accountability begins on the day a warning enters an institution. From that day, the office holding the information carries a duty that reassignment, silence, or confidence in expert optimism cannot discharge.

A Warning That Crossed Institutions

Campbell served as an Army chaplain from 1963 to 1977. Diocesan records say he retired in late 1977 and applied for an assignment in Springfield. The Army chaplain who phoned the diocese said the matter had been handled confidentially through the military, without publicity, and that Campbell had resigned when it surfaced. The memo closed by noting that a report would follow.

McNicholas named him pastor of Saint Jude in Rochester within weeks and, in 1979, pastor in the town of Assumption. The records show that abuse in Assumption began almost immediately and that the diocese had notice of it by January 1980.

In December 1981, a family told the bishop about Campbell’s conduct with their daughter. Campbell admitted it to the bishop and soon afterward resigned as pastor, citing health reasons. Within months he received another parish. Each step followed the last within months, and none of them removed him from contact with children.

At Saint Maurice in Morrisonville, from 1982 to 1985, diocesan records indicate he abused 26 children. The same record counts 33 children abused in the diocese, all after the Army’s warning; those figures are reports drawn from files, not findings adjudicated child by child. The court record is firm on the rest: in 1985 Campbell was indicted for molesting boys aged 11 to 15, pleaded guilty but mentally ill, and received a 14-year sentence.

A law firm that handles clergy abuse claims in Illinois publishes a summary of Springfield diocese priest Alvin L. Campbell and the claims against him, drawing on that public record. The criminal case addressed what Campbell did. What the institution owed after it was warned is a question of institutional accountability, and it requires a different set of tools.

Institutions Need a Forum to Be Accountable

Utrecht University scholar Mark Bovens defines accountability as a relationship between an actor and a forum. The actor must explain and justify its conduct, the forum can question it and pass judgment, and the actor may face consequences. Without a forum able to demand an answer, a failure produces regret and no accountability. Courts serve as forums in other domains, such as climate litigation, where governments and companies must justify what they did not do.

Campbell’s case ran through several forums, and each stopped at its own boundary. He had been reprimanded as an Army chaplain and left the service, according to an Associated Press report. A criminal court judged the man in 1985. The church’s own legal system moved slowly: Bishop Daniel Ryan waited about four years after Campbell’s imprisonment before asking Rome to remove him from the priesthood.

Institutional accountability begins on the day a warning enters an institution.

In his request to Rome, Ryan noted that Campbell’s crimes and another priest’s had cost the diocese $1.5 million in damages and legal fees. Consequences form one element of institutional accountability as defined above, and money paid to claimants satisfies it in part. Payment leaves open the other elements: who decided what, on what information, and who must explain it.

In July 1989, the Vatican office then led by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger refused, because the petition lacked Campbell’s own request, and told the bishop to hold a church trial, following church law at the time. After his release in 1992, following about seven years in prison, Campbell was persuaded to accept removal, and Rome granted it.

How Secrecy and Delay Defeat Accountability

The Army’s confidential handling shows how secrecy defeats accountability, a pattern that recurs in security institutions. A warning passed in confidence, through a channel no outside forum can inspect, creates no duty that anyone can enforce. Institutional accountability requires channels that an outside forum can examine. No forum in this sequence was charged with answering for the sequence as a whole.

The public forum came last. Before the Illinois attorney general investigated, the six Illinois dioceses had publicly listed 103 substantiated abusers; the investigation’s report names 451 clerics who abused at least 1,997 children. The decades between the abuse and that accounting were years in which no forum with power over the institution had the facts.

Kwame Raoul, the attorney general, said that decades of Catholic leadership decisions and policies allowed “known child sex abusers to hide, often in plain sight.” The statement locates the failure in leadership decisions and policies, the level at which offices operate. A forum that convenes decades later can name failures. It cannot prevent them.

Access compounds the delay. Until a 2017 law, Illinois gave victims of child sexual abuse 20 years from their eighteenth birthday to act, and many survivors of clerical abuse, as the coverage of the announcement noted, will never see justice in a legal sense. A court that closes before a survivor can speak is a forum in name only.

Why the Problem of Many Hands Fails Here

Political philosopher Dennis Thompson named the problem of many hands: when many officials contribute to a decision, it becomes hard to say who is morally responsible for the outcome. He argued that two common remedies, blaming whoever stands at the top and blaming the collective, distort the idea of responsibility. He proposed personal responsibility, tested by causal and volitional criteria.

The problem is the standard objection to institutional accountability: responsibility that dissolves into the collective leaves no one to answer. The 1978 record shows no such dissolution. One chaplain made one call. One memo went to one bishop. The same bishop made the appointment less than a month later. On the diocese’s own records, the causal link and the choice, the two criteria Thompson uses, sit in a single office.

An official who received a written warning cannot claim that the information was scattered beyond his reach. The many hands appear afterward. In the decades after the 1985 conviction, successive bishops, diocesan staff, church lawyers, and Roman offices each held part of the knowledge and part of the authority. Here institutional accountability depends on design: who must record, who must disclose, and who must answer for the whole sequence.

A Diocese Knows What Its Files Record

Christian List and Philip Pettit argue in Group Agency that churches, companies, and states are agents in their own right, distinct from their members, with attitudes formed through the procedures that aggregate their members’ judgments. If that account holds, “the diocese knew” is a literal description. The memo and the family’s complaint were information held by the institution and available to every later officeholder.

Succession then settles a question that the many-hands problem leaves open. A bishop who inherits the files inherits the information, so he cannot treat a predecessor’s choice as someone else’s. Institutional accountability attaches to the office and travels with it. Each holder answers for what the file told him and for what he did next.

This reading also answers Thompson’s worry about the collective. Responsibility does not dissolve into the diocese as a whole, because the diocese acts through offices, and each office has a holder at each date. The bishop in 1978, the bishop in 1984, and the official who wrote the memo each stand in a particular relation to particular information. The institution’s agency makes the question answerable, and the roster of officeholders makes the answer personal.

Reassignment deserves a precise description. Moving a priest whom the file marks as a risk to a new parish is an act with identifiable recipients: the families of that parish, who lack the information the office holds. Calling it an omission hides the decision inside the silence. After the 1981 complaint, the records show exactly this sequence: admission, resignation, and a new parish within months.

The Hindsight Objection

The strongest objection holds that bishops acted on the best professional advice of their time. At a meeting of the U.S. bishops, Bishop John Ricard of Pensacola-Tallahassee recalled that bishops were often told the problem “can be treated by conventional psychotherapy,” and that they followed that advice. The objection has force. Judging 1978 by the knowledge of today would be anachronism.

The objection fits a treated priest’s return to ministry. It does not reach the Campbell record. The January 1978 memo relayed a warning from a senior Army chaplain, not a clinical prognosis, and the appointment followed within weeks. After the 1981 complaint and Campbell’s own admission, the reassignment came within months. Institutional accountability needs no hindsight here: ignorance fails as an excuse when the official’s own files recorded the facts.

Reliance on expertise also has limits that research later documented. The John Jay College study commissioned by the bishops’ conference found no single cause or predictor of abuse by Catholic clergy. That finding gives little ground for certainty about any individual priest, and an institution that leans on a clinician’s assurance owns the risk it takes.

A second objection comes from Iris Marion Young. In Responsibility for Justice, she contrasts a liability model, which assigns fault for past acts, with a social connection model, in which everyone who contributes to a structure that produces injustice shares a forward-looking duty to change it. Blame, she observed, breeds defensiveness. Young still held the liability model appropriate in many contexts, and the 1978 appointment belongs to one of them.

Institutional Accountability Starts With Three Duties

Young’s model gives institutional accountability what liability alone cannot supply: a present duty. After Campbell, every institution that employs chaplains, pastors, coaches, and teachers shares a duty to change the procedures that carried a warning from one desk to the next without effect. That duty binds the Army and the dioceses as they exist now, whatever the guilt of the men in office in 1978.

Psychologists Carly Smith and Jennifer Freyd call it institutional betrayal when trusted institutions, including churches, schools, and the military, harm people who depend on them for safety. Betrayal, they argue, includes omission and commission. The Campbell record contains omission in the Army’s private handling and commission in the diocese’s appointments.

Three duties follow for any institution that receives a warning. First, record it in a form that outlasts the officeholder. Second, separate the person from those he could harm until the claim is resolved. Third, disclose the warning to the people at risk and to the authorities. Each duty takes effect when the warning arrives, since proof comes later, usually in court.

In this case proof came in 1985, after the diocese had received three separate signals: the Army’s call, the notice of abuse in Assumption, and the family’s complaint. Triggering duties before proof carries a cost, since an unfounded warning can damage an innocent person who deserves due process. Graduated duties answer that cost.

Recording costs the accused nothing. Separation from contact with children can be temporary and carry no finding of guilt, as with suspension on full pay. Disclosure to the authorities hands the question to bodies equipped to test it, and public naming can wait for substantiation. The diocese’s records show a different order: reassignment at each stage, and a criminal process only in 1985.

When Warnings Cross Institutions

Between institutions, a fourth rule applies: the receiver must answer in writing, and the sender must confirm that it did. In Springfield, the warning arrived by telephone and was recorded in a memo written by the receiving diocese, and that memo noted that a report would follow. Child protection suffers from the gap between children’s rights on paper and in practice, and a written chain of answers narrows it.

Institutional accountability that begins at the scandal arrives too late for the children it concerns. The standard that protects them is set earlier, at the desk where the first warning lands, and it asks one question of whoever sits there: what will this office do with what it now knows? That question applies to dioceses, armies, schools, and agencies alike.