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	When Priests Were Kings By Kevin Hegarty Mayo News June 8, 2009 http://www.mayonews.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6798&Itemid=40 "After each flurry of revelations, Church leaders apologise profusely for what happened. They outline the measures now in place designed to prevent repetition. Behind the rhetoric of apology there is the unspoken hope that the storm of controversy will quickly abate when media attention moves elsewhere. Damage limitation is the key to official policy." THE American novelist, Mary Gordon wrote, some years ago, that her mother would find it impossible to understand two things about today's world; the demise of the typewriter and that when most Americans now think of Catholic priests, their minds first turn to thoughts of sexual scandal. So far as clergy are concerned it was all so different when Mary was young. In her memoir, 'Circling My Mother', she has expressed the awe in which priests were held in the Catholic community: "It is almost impossible to convey to anyone under fifty the glamour, the shimmer, the esteem that attached to priests when my mother was young, right through the time I was a teenager, the mid-sixties at least. Priests were treated like princes - no, like kings. As with royalty, certain metonymies applied. If the king was his sceptre or his crown, the priest was his hands. The awe connected with the Eucharist was expressed by the attention centred on the hands of priests. Their hands turned bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. A priest took special care of his hands. He was allowed that vanity. It was considered neither self-indulgent nor effeminate. A certain kind of Catholic understood that there were white linen towels kept especially for a priest's visit, so that no cloth but white linen would touch his sacred hands... Nothing was too much to do for them... Their visits were anticipated, treasured, like the visit of a movie star to a small town." By the late 1960's, this unhealthy deference had begun to decline. American Catholics responded enthusiastically to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which sought to distance the Church from the hierarchical model which placed bishops and priests on pedestals. The Council's insight that the Church was the people of God, though later emasculated by the Vatican curia, won widespread support. It resonated with the American spirit of democracy and egalitarianism. Emboldened by the cathartic excitement generated by the Council, American Catholics became the most vocal supporters of change in the church, most notably on contraception, compulsory celibacy and women priests. The scandals of clerical sexual abuse of children, as they emerged in the US from the mid-eighties onwards, saw the final crumbling of the age of deference. A modern historian dates the decline of traditional authority in Britain to July 1, 1916, when 60,000 soldiers were sent to their deaths at the start of the Battle of the Somme, because of the negligence and incompetence of their generals. The abuse revelations had a similar effect on American Catholics. Over 1,500 cases of clerical sexual abuse of children have been reported in the US. In the Arch-diocese of Boston, the Massachusetts Attorney General demanded, and eventually obtained, Church records showing that more than 90 priests had been accused of sexual abuse by hundreds of victims over the previous forty years. This figure did not include priests who had died. The usual response of the Church authorities had been either to ignore the information, or explain it away, or to transfer the priest to another assignment where his proclivity would be unknown. Lay American Catholics were stunned by the revelations but they did not remain silent. In Boston, Cardinal Law called a meeting of over 3,000 lay Catholic leaders in March 2002, at the World Trade Centre near Boston Harbour. They did not mince their words. They told Law that they felt Church leaders had betrayed them. They called for a thorough reform of Church structures. As one observer put it, "they were a pretty outraged flock." One participant, Bonnie Ciambotti, a Eucharistic Minister and religious education teacher, asserted: "We need to change the whole power structure of the Church. We need more women. The power, and the male dominance, and the secrecy are how this whole thing started." Outside of the official church structure, Dr James E Muller, a cardiologist at the Harvard Medical School, started a movement, 'Voice of the Faithful', to articulate the dismay of lay Catholics about the revelations and to campaign for real change in the Church. The movement attracted 6,800 supporters from all over the arch-diocese and 22 countries around the world. Muller's nightmare scenario is "that the Church successfully papers over the clergy sexual abuse problem and leaves intact an abusive power structure." What of the Irish Catholic Church in the wake of the clergy sexual abuse revelations here, forcefully brought home to us once again recently by the Ryan report on industrial schools? After each flurry of revelations, Church leaders apologise profusely for what happened. They outline the measures now in place designed to prevent repetition. Behind the rhetoric of apology there is the unspoken hope that the storm of controversy will quickly abate when media attention moves elsewhere. Damage limitation is the key to official policy. Lay Irish Catholics are appalled by the scandal of abuse, as letters to newspapers and contributions to radio and television indicate. From them, however, there has been no comprehensive and coherent response. The culture of deference to clergy, though weakened in recent decades, is more deeply embedded in Ireland that it was in the US. Catholic church leaders in Ireland need to hear the voices of lay church members on this crucial matter. I believe that the Church should employ independent facilitators with the brief of establishing how these voices might be heard. As is glaringly obvious now, bishops and priests did not have the right answers in the past. They can hardly expect to have them now.
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