venerdì 19 febbraio 2010

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The news that the Pope is to issue a pastoral letter to the Irish church had already been greeted somewhat unenthusiastically by victims or in the general public debate. Although it has been noted that this has happened on only two previous occasions, in Germany 1937 and China a couple of years ago, it is not regarded as addressing the issue of the church’s accountability to the civic power, which is the question that both victims and media are keen to prosecute. Crimes were committed and covered-up, and so the church has to put this right before it begins to address any issues of an internal organizational or spiritual malaise. Whether this is true or not does not matter: it is what is being said, hour by hour, day after day.

 

Any objective observer would have to concede that it is probably impossible for the Pope to find words to meet both the heightened sense of hurt among victims and the public antagonism whipped up by media agitation. But it also has to be said that, in the context of the horrors outlines in the Ryan and Murphy reports, there is little possibility of summoning up support for the church’s dilemma.

 

There are many factors at play. One, of course, is the enormity of the hurt that has been inflicted on so many people by church abuses, both at the individual level by paedophile priests and the official level by those who dragged their feet or sought to deal with these crimes behind closed doors.

 

Then there are the journalists who report these matters, creating the context and delivering the verdicts. Every day in the Irish media, a war is in progress. The victims of the abuse from the 1950s onwards have centre stage and are being used to full effect by elements within the media and society which seek to put an end to Irish Catholicism for all time. Yet, it is impossible to argue with anything they say, because every time an opportunity is presented to address the real problem in a total and coherent way, the church leaderships makes another mess of it.

 

For nearly two decades, the Church in Ireland has been on the ropes, having suffered a dramatic decline in influence and credibility. The present crisis began, more or less, with what now appears a comparatively innocent matter: the resignation of a former Bishop of Galway, Eamonn Casey, in 1992, following revelations that he had a child with an American woman. But the pattern was to continue for more than a decade with a series of shocking revelations about horrific breaches of trust by a handful of priests who had sexually abused children, and also immense systematic abuse of children within Church-controlled institutions for juvenile delinquents.

 

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