Institutions shield upper echelons from accountability by deflecting blame to subordinate causes.

Evidence

The Vatican continued to evade responsibility for the sexual abuse of children. In representing the Vatican, Archbishop Silvano Tomasi answered questions at a UN panel reviewing the Vatican’s compliance with the international covenant prohibiting torture (Cumming-Bruce, 2014). One can debate the legality of whether the rape of a young child by a priest is an act of torture. However, this is a separate issue. The present analysis focuses on the morality of how the sexual abuses were handled. Tomasi repeated the exonerations that the pope’s jurisdiction is confined to Vatican City and that the sex crimes are a product of a permissive culture. What was new was the complete silence on the legal and moral failings of the upper echelon of the church hierarchy. The bishops and archbishops presided over the cover-up, reassigned predatory priests to unwitting parishes, and broke the law by not reporting the sex crimes to civil authorities. The hierarchy continued to be shielded from accountability for their actions until Pope Francis approved a Vatican tribunal in June 2015 to hold bishops who failed to report abuse accountable for their actions. At the civil level, they incurred no penalties for breaking the law. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 549

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the vault’s institutional-blaming claims: how organizations rationalize harm via jurisdictional and cultural scapegoating rather than admitting culpability of leadership. — connects to: Bureaucrats absorb blame for system-level failures they did not decide. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1325; Accountability requires a reliable link between what superiors seek and what subordinates do. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 1155; Institutional scandals are reframed as isolated individual failures to deflect systemic blame.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 549