Culture & Religion

IRELAND/ The Unforgiveable sins of the Irish church

John Waters

venerdì 19 febbraio 2010

Often, in Ireland these days, one is moved to think that the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church has a minimal understanding of the culture into which they must speak. This week, when the Irish bishops went to the Vatican to discuss with the Pope and his officials the continuing crisis in the Irish church – a crisis outlined in graphic detail in a series of government reports on sexual abuse by clergy and cover-up by church leaders – it was as if nobody involved had been able to predict what was obvious and inevitable.

Beforehand, media coverage of the visit was in Ireland illustrated with photographs of the bishops smilingly lining up with the Pope before their encounter. The Irish Times last Monday carried a front page photograph of the Bishop Drennan of Galway bending down to kiss Pope Benedict’s ring. Bishop Drennan has become notorious in Ireland because he has refused to resign after being named among those accused of failing to act effectively against abusers in the recent Murphy Report into clerical abuse. He has held his ground in the face of an almost overwhelming media clamour for heads to roll.

All in all, this week’s meeting appears to have been poorly planned and badly stage-managed. There seemed to be a failure on the part of participants to understand precisely what the tone of the encounter should be, or what was expected back in Ireland by media, public and victims of clerical abuse.

Within minutes of the release of the post-meeting press statement, the Irish media were announcing that it was inadequate. There was no apology to the victims, no acknowledgement of the complicity of senior church figures in cover-ups. Indeed, it was said, the Pope had “washed his hands” of the scandals. The statement’s emphasis on rebuilding the church, it was alleged, showed a failure to grasp the more immediate necessity for reparation and atonement. It had all been a charade. Representatives of victim advocacy groups were lined up to declare that their members had been further hurt by the statement. They said they had been expecting the Pope to come to Ireland to apologise personally to victims, or at least to invite representatives of victims to meet him in Rome. They were dismayed that resignations were not on the agenda and because the Vatican had not accepted any culpability. One Irish broadsheet newspaper, The Examiner, led with the banner headline, “Papal Whitewash”.

Attempts by church leaders and supporters to point out that this was just part of a process leading to the Pope’s forthcoming pastoral letter were shouted down. Church spokesmen pointed to the language of the statement, which plainly states that the sexual abuse of children is “not only a heinous crime but also a grave sin”. To no avail. Did the Pope think a pastoral letter was going to heal the damage to those who have been abused? One unfortunate Vatican correspondent who tried to outline things from the official perspective on a radio programme was drowned out by a victim shouting, “Stop saying that – you’re hurting me!”

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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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This lead to a loss of innocence for many Irish Catholics, not all of them young, who walked away in disillusionment or at least withdrew into more private practice, shocked and numbed by the evasiveness and dissembling of the institutional Church. In truth, this withdrawal was as much rooted in general questions of faith and spirituality as in the specifics of clerical or organisational behaviour regarding children.

Irish Catholicism had long since ceased to offer a coherent version of Christianity to the generations it had itself educated out of poverty and ignorance. Despite the fervent shows of devotion at the time of Pope John Paul II’s visit in 1979, the writing was already on the wall. Although now speaking to one of the best-educated populations in the world, the Irish Catholic Church was still pushing the same limited and simplistic moralism it had promoted in the dark days of post-Famine Ireland, an essentially fear- and rule- based religiosity that achieved no productive engagement with the freedoms that had become available to the generations born after the middle of the 20th century. The scandals of the 1990s and after, therefore, provided the perfect alibi for those generations to reject the Church and all it stood for, exposing Irish Catholicism to charges of rank hypocrisy and enabling many of the formerly faithful to dismiss certain inconvenient elements of the Church’s teaching.

There are, of course, elements of disingenuousness about these responses. Reports of sexual abuse by priests have been deeply shocking for many people, but few can say that they were unaware of the picture outlined in last year’s Ryan Report, concerning physical abuse and maltreatment of children in church-run institutions over many decades. But, far from relieving the Church’s situation, this has made things worse, because the society now seeks to find ready scapegoats for a cultural phenomenon in which many more people – judges, policemen, social workers, child protection officers – are implicated than are now willing to admit to their roles. For as long as the church remains the centre of attention, the other guilty parties will be able to avoid the wrath of a culture seeking to purge its guilt and shame by expressing as much outrage as is humanly feasible.