The Irish Times
March 8, 2010
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2010/0308/1224265794334.html
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| Church figures might ask themselves: "Did you know what the institution was doing and the full consequences of what it was doing? Because, if you did, you were complicit with the recklessness. Or if the answer is you didn't know, then you cannot have been discharging your responsibility . . . properly." Photo by Cyril Byrne |
IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops begin their three-day spring meeting in Maynooth today. They have lots to talk about. All those holes, and still digging.
They might consider this. “The question you have to ask yourselves is: did you know what the institution was doing and the full consequences of what it was doing? Because, if you did, you were complicit with the recklessness. Or if the answer is you didn’t know, then you cannot have been discharging your responsibility . . . properly.”
Those questions were posed by Niall Fitzgerald, former chairman and chief executive of the multinational Unilever, and former chairman of the global media agency Reuters, as recalled in an Irish Times interview on Saturday. He posed them to friends of his in the Irish business world last summer. It provoked “a very ferocious conversation” and “real anger”.
Such questions apply as much to Ireland’s Catholic bishops, not least the “saw no evil, heard no evil” Bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan.
Mr Fitzgerald also made this observation about Irish business figures. “I have been genuinely amazed . . . that they just haven’t got it. They don’t realise the degree of rage and anger that’s around, and that they have to make significant personal sacrifices to rebuild society’s trust in them and their institutions.” So too with our Catholic bishops.
The very latest example of this “still don’t get it” syndrome among the bishops was that speech by Bishop of Ferns Dennis Brennan last Monday night. When it came to “the funding of claims associated with child abuse as perpetrated by some members of the clergy”, it would “be necessary to invite the parishes to become part of the process financially”, he said.
Such “funding sought is not about sharing the blame, it is about asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility. That I did not cause the problem is not the response of the Christian . . .” he said.
Later, he ruled out asking the Vatican for financial help to compensate abuse victims. “I do not want to burden others,” he said. “This is our responsibility, and we would like to discharge our responsibilities ourselves,” he said.
Better then to burden the people of Ferns.
Colm O’Gorman, who knows a thing or two about what went on in Ferns diocese, pointed out that the Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest institutions on the planet. He suggested that victims of clerical sex abuse should take cases against the church, so holding the institution itself responsible rather than the people in the pews.
He also reminded us of another very recent “still don’t get it” episode.
“Anyone that was offended by the sheer vulgarity and grandiosity of the pictures that we saw coming out of the so-called summit by Irish bishops in Rome . . . will see the amount of money that swills around in the Vatican and the global church coffers. Let [us] see them divest themselves of some of that sort of wealth,” he said.
So Bishop Brennan prefers to lay the “burden” on people in Ferns. But if this is accepted in Ferns – the mother of all Irish Catholic dioceses when it comes to the clerical child sex abuse issue – you can be sure it will be followed by other Irish Catholic dioceses.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 23, we see Jesus at his most ferocious.
Speaking about scribes and Pharisees, the religious leaders of the day, he said: “They tie up heavy burdens and lay them on men’s shoulders, but will they lift a finger to move them? Not they! Everything they do is to attract attention, like wearing broader phylacteries and longer tassels, like wanting to take the place of honour at banquets and the front seats in the synagogues, being greeted obsequiously in the market squares and having people call them Rabbi . . . Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut up the kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces, neither going in yourselves nor allowing others to go in who want to.”
Rough, tough, but . . . that was Jesus!
It was the gospel reading at Mass on Sunday, October 30th, 2005, the first Sunday following publication of the Ferns report. That day, a Mass at Rowe Street church in Wexford town was celebrated by Bishop Eamonn Walsh, then administrator of the diocese. In his homily, he spoke of how the gospel reading was “so relevant for today”. Indeed.
Yet still, some Irish bishops continued in the old ways. Yesterday on the BBC Northern Ireland Sunday Sequence programme, Ian Elliott, chief executive of the Catholic Church’s own watchdog, the National Board for Safeguarding Children, spoke of “hostility” he had experienced from bishops, and others “who create difficulties” as he attempted to implement uniform child protection guidelines in the church.
He spoke of “incomplete” guidelines and a “deficit in terms of policy” where child protection guidelines are concerned in the church.
Perhaps those tardy church figures share the view of Mgr Alex Stenson, chancellor to three archbishops of Dublin (Ryan, McNamara, Connell) from 1981-1997, and who also features in the Murphy report.
In an interview last January with the Irish Catholic newspaper, he said: “What abusers did was wrong. It was dreadful, but was it always sinful? It was always wrong. Sinful? I am not so sure at times.
“If someone is a paedophile, it can have a bearing on their culpability. In church law, culpability may be reduced depending on the severity of the pathology.”
Pope Benedict would seem to differ. Following his meeting with the Irish bishops last month, the pope said: “The sexual abuse of children and young people is not only a heinous crime, but also a grave sin which offends God and wounds the dignity of the human person created in his image.”
Should someone tell Mgr Stenson? Does it matter?
In that same interview, Mgr Stenson also parted company with the Murphy Commission and current Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin on the commission’s finding that there was a culture of secrecy in the archdiocese. There was no such thing, Mgr Stenson said. What there was, “was a Christian culture of confidentiality and respect for people’s reputations”.
The bishops and their sycophantic acolytes, lay and clerical, had better “get it” – or the Catholic Church in Ireland has a destiny which is as predictable as gravity.
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