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	Man of Cloth Recast As Just a Jobsworth Irish Independent March 21, 2010 http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/man-of-cloth-recast-as-just-a-jobsworth-2106164.html IRELAND -- Hiding behind the rule book smacks of the worst sort of public service union thinking, says Eilis O'Hanlon THE two biggest horror films of last year, Drag Me To Hell and Paranormal Activity, both feature ordinary people under attack from supernatural forces, but what's remarkable about them is that in neither film do the protagonists approach the church for help. Psychics, yes. Quacks, absolutely. But the idea that priests could be any use simply doesn't cross their minds. That's quite different from the horror classics of the Seventies like The Omen and The Exorcist, where, hard as it is to believe now, priests were cast in the role of heroic defenders of the innocent. It's a small illustration of how the popular perception of priests has changed, and it's hardly unrelated to the fact that while the fictional priests of the Seventies were giving their lives to defend the innocent from evil, many actual priests in the same period were, in the manner of the now Cardinal Sean Brady, wired into a system which knowingly left the innocent exposed to abuse and actively colluded in covering it up. Is it any wonder that we're seemingly more willing now to believe in the existence of the Devil than God? As the details unfolded last week of the role played by Fr Brady, as he then was, in the measly internal investigation carried out by the Irish church in 1975 into the activities of notorious paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth, it even led to a bizarre post-cultural juxtaposition. While John and Edward Grimes, aka Jedward, were paying the ultimate price for failure -- being dumped by their record label for no greater crime than singing and dancing badly and having silly haircuts and failing to shift enough units of their debut single -- the leader of the Catholic church was clinging on by his fingertips to his job, despite having admitted to being part of a team which made children who had been abused sign statements swearing them to secrecy. When your level of personal responsibility falls below that of an X Factor novelty act, then something has seriously gone wrong with the moral compass. Cardinal Brady's excuse is that he was only obeying orders. It's a paraphrase, but that's basically what he means. His defence is that he was following normal church procedure at the time. But are priests not meant to be swayed by higher powers, eternal truths? Others might be able to argue that those were different times, and that notions of right and wrong have changed. However, the church's Unique Selling Point -- the thing which makes it different from any other civil organisation -- is that it is founded on notions of right and wrong that, by definition, can never change, which transcend time and space. Hiding behind the rule book in this way smacks of the worst sort of public service union thinking. It's the man of the cloth now recast as little more than a pen-pushing jobsworth. It might save his job, but at what cost to the already battered reputation of the Irish church? That's the real dilemma. Talking about Cardinal Brady's relative youth and inexperience at the time is pathetic. He was 36 when he sat in those meetings at which children who had been abused by clerical perverts were forced to sign vile documents committing them to "never directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or by word, or writing, or in any other way, and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and serious cause . . . commit anything against fidelity to this secret". He was certainly old enough to know better, as the saying goes, whatever the organisational culture in which he worked. Looking back, he is no doubt genuinely horrified at what he and his colleagues did in those days when damaged children came to them looking for help. But if he gets the period of reflection that he was asking for last week as calls for his resignation rang out, what are the chances that Cardinal Brady will emerge from it with anything to offer except more institutional cliches about learning from the mistakes of the past? How likely is it that we will ever get to hear his real story, the story of a good man who did the wrong thing when put in a dark place, and what that felt like, what that still feels like? Sure, he's "ashamed" now that his dirty laundry is being washed in public, but was he equally ashamed two weeks ago when nobody else knew? Or did he simply never think about it as the years went by? The omens are not good. Speaking in Armagh Cathedral on St Patrick's Day, Sean Brady even apologised to "all those who feel I have let them down". Why not simply "all those who I have let down"? Why the rhetorical fancy footwork? Of course, David Quinn, former editor of the Irish Catholic, is right when he says that, if Cardinal Brady ought to resign, then there are legions of people in secular society who should be following him swiftly down to the job centre. The State's complicity in the sexual torture of children is only beginning to be unravelled; and to hear Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness call on Cardinal Brady to resign for failing to protect children, while his party leader, Gerry Adams, still has so many questions to answer about how he dealt with his own brother's alleged abusive activities, is to be revolted all over again at the oozing slime of hypocrisy that these people squelch through every day of their political lives. There are too many people using the church to draw out the sniper fire and save their own skins. The problem is that, even if all this is true, and the Catholic Church is indeed only one organisation among many fatally damaged by a failure to protect vulnerable children, what could possibly represent a successful outcome for them? The State can redefine itself; politicians come and go; a few successful heads rolling; a big fat official report followed by some cosmetic structural rejigging, and it's business as usual. The Catholic Church, by contrast, is meant to stand for eternity and truth. Its errors go right to the heart of its role as a bastion of moral authority. Once that's gone, it has lost everything. That would be no cause for celebration, albeit that there are plenty of people in Ireland who think a country scoured clean of all its religious undertones and iconography would be some sort of secular rationalist paradise. Too much of value would have been swept away. As things stand, though, it's becoming increasingly hard to find the nugget of heavenly gold in all the earthly mud in which the Catholic church is swamped. The days when Catholic priests are once more the heroes of Hollywood movies will be a long time returning, and the church has no one but itself to blame for that. Sadly, accepting responsibility isn't something that big bloated public service organisations do particularly well. Back-covering and buck-passing is more the order of the day. It's a long way from the Sermon on the Mount.
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