(The Nationalist, 26 April 2002)
Someone said recently that what September 11th was for the USA, the second week of April was for the Catholic Church in Ireland. It was an unforgettable, traumatic week. I think it was the week when people grew tired of hearing apologies for past failures and demanded to get action. Like any such experience, there was something to learn from it.
The Church needs to ask itself how we got into this mess in the first place. The blame for their crimes rests on the shoulders of the abusers, but it has to be asked how sexual abuse of children by clergy, both from religious orders and dioceses, went unchecked for so long. The Boy Scouts were able to put a stop to Seán Fortune even before he was ordained. But his own diocese didn’t. Why? I think the answers come under two headings – structural and spiritual.
The Church’s structures are too slow and too secretive. Sometimes they are self-serving rather than Gospel-serving. They do not respect the principle of subsidiarity, even though that principle was first formulated by a pope – Pius XI. They are top-down systems, geared to the maintenance of a power structure. There isn’t accountability in them other than to the upper levels of authority. They have little effective lay participation. And decision-making is often by dictate rather than by dialogue.
Just imagine for a moment that we had married bishops or women bishops. Would those problems have been handled in the same way? I doubt it.
There is a spiritual dimension as well. I regret to say this, but in the Church we do not have a culture of seeking the truth for its own sake. We are too locked into previously prepared positions, doctrinal or otherwise. Sometimes our decisions are made on the basis of improvised rules of thumb, hoping they will do for the moment. That isn’t good enough.
We do not have a sufficiently firm commitment to justice. We tend to see people like Ms. Marie Collins as nuisances who are making too much of something that happened forty years ago. We sometimes suspect that the bottom line is money. Sometimes, too, we represent the child not as victim but as seducer and the priest as victim of seduction.
Another obstacle is secretiveness. At almost any cost we want to keep things under wraps and not wash our dirty linen in public. How different might events in Ferns have been if the priests of the diocese had collectively said to Seán Fortune, ‘Your conduct is evil; you must go’. I don’t see how he could have stayed on in the face of such a stand. But our secretiveness worked against doing that.
Perhaps our greatest failing is lack of moral courage. It is the clergy’s and Ireland’s besetting sin.