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	‘I Pity the Catholics Who Believed in Their Leaders’ By Catherine Nixey The Times April 23, 2010 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article7105461.ece As the Catholic clergy in England say sorry, our writer, the child of a former monk and nun, looks at the scandal engulfing the Church Sunday morning Mass at the Brompton Oratory Catholic Church, in Kensington, southwest London. At a signal, the congregation stands. In unison, they speak: “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty.” They are reciting the Nicene Creed, as Roman Catholics have recited it for centuries before. Today such a statement of belief seems a difficult one to profess. Not only because of the abuses of children committed by priests worldwide, in Ireland, Malta and Germany, but also because of the extent to which the Catholic Church has attempted to cover it up — that implicates even Pope Benedict XVI himself, whose alleged cover-up of abuse in America has led the critic Christopher Hitchens, with the support of Richard Dawkins, to call for his arrest. On Monday, the Pope cried and expressed his “shame and sorrow” for the Maltese abuses. Yesterday, the Catholic Church in England and Wales offered public repentance. But are such acts enough to convince the Catholic faithful that their Church — which the Pope describes as a “wounded, sinner Church” — is still, as the creed calls it, a “holy Church” for which one can, in the literal and the metaphorical sense, stand? These are questions that all those within the Catholic family must ask. It is a family to which I belong. Not only because I was brought up a Catholic, but also because — before they met and married — my father was a monk for 14 years and my mother a nun for 12. What to think now of the institution to which they gave so much of their lives? Can it survive this? While Catholics are more likely to go to church on Sundays than other denominations, the decline in Catholic attendance in England has been dramatic, falling from about two million in 1979 to under one million today, according to figures published in UKCH Religious Trends. Other European countries have seen similar declines. When asked why they no longer attend, the reasons given include a sense that the Vatican is aloof; disapproval of the Church’s prohibitions on artificial birth control — and objection to how it has handled this scandal. “I don’t think this will affect older Catholics, but when you are younger your views are less crystallised and more open to change,” says Dr Eric Kaufman, reader in politics at Birkbeck College, London, and author of Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?. “For those young Catholics perhaps considering exiting for other reasons, this may make the difference. [It] has undoubtedly made a difference to the numbers in the pews in Ireland.” Some people have been more protective of the Church. Facebook now has a site called “Support the Pope”, set up to “let him know that he is not alone and that he has not been abandoned”. It links to a website on which Catholics are encouraged to “sign their name as a pledge of love, prayer, and support for Pope Benedict XVI”. A further 111,000 are Facebook fans of the Pope’s own page. Another website encourages readers to pray for the Pope “amid the anti-Catholic sentiment in the media of today”. Jack Valero is coordinator for Catholic Voices, a group of young British Catholics aiming to spread a positive message before the Pope’s visit here in September and has seen both views. “Some [Catholics] saw all of these allegations and reacted with surprise and consternation. They didn’t know what to think. Other members have become rather negative about the media. They feel embattled and believe that there is a conspiracy against the Church.” As the Mass at the Oratory ends I follow the congregation outside, passing a sign that the Church’s attitude, at least in England, has changed dramatically over the past decade or so. On the wall is a poster advertising a confidential telephone number for the “Archbishop’s representative for Child Protection”. This number is one of the reasons Britain has, largely, avoided much of the present scandal. Ten years ago, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, the head of the Church in England and Wales, ordered an inquiry into child protection. The Nolan Report — its result — issued fifty guidelines, including police checks on all clergy, and the establishment of a national child-protection unit. The reaction from the Catholics at the Oratory seems to be not one of condemnation for the media — but rather of praise for it, and the openness that its attention has brought. “Some Catholics have asked how the press can do this to the Church,” says Theresa Civantos, a 20-year-old Catholic and student from Chicago. “But I think the media has done a great thing. There has always been corruption and scandal in the Church. Bringing it to light gives us a chance to do something about it.” Frankie Lynch, 30, who attends Mass here, agrees. “Terrible atrocities have happened and they should never have been covered up. It was appalling and those who are guilty should be held accountable. I think this is starting to happen. I think that now the Catholic church is, rightly, going through something of a purge.” “There is no doubt that there have been monsters in our Church who we haven’t dealt with,” Valero says. “Many think this might enable real reform and cleansing. I had an e-mail recently from a Catholic who was saying that maybe the wrong kind of power is now being wrenched from the Church and we are being purified.” My father, who has left the Church and is no longer a believer, echoes the sentiment. “This is an excellent chance for the Church to open its windows, to cleanse itself,” he says. “The Church is not a wholly bad institution: far from it. Ordinary priests, monks and nuns are good people, kind and open hearted. But they have been betrayed by the actions of their leaders. Leaders who, with timidity and arrogance, sought to protect themselves at the expense of the people they should have been protecting. This will humble the Church: a humbling it deserves.” It is a humbling that would have been unthinkable at the time when my parents joined the Church in the Sixties. Both had been to religious schools and so strongly did they admire the priests, monks and nuns who taught them that they took religious orders when they were in their early twenties. My mother’s decision to leave came about through a certain disillusionment with the Church; my father’s because he met my mother. With such parents, one might have expected our house to have resounded with Hail Marys but not a bit: our Catholic education was mild and non-doctrinal; my brother became an atheist and devoted apostle of Dawkins. I was, and remain, unsure: incapable of summoning what seems to me to be the belief required either for atheism or theism. When I was growing up, nuns and monks were often at our house. Guests whom I adored: the nuns because they were kind and the monks because they drank, smoked and knew a lot. None of them struck me as “hysterical, sinister virgins”, as Hitchens has called them. My brother’s and my views on the scandal are therefore more those of lay people: horror at the crimes, pity for the victims and incomprehension at the cowardly, cruel and self-serving leaders who saw fit to cover it up. Where my views differ is that there is not, to me, a more general suspicion that monks, nuns and priests are in any way odd. A page on the BBC website asks: “Does Catholic celibacy lead to child sex abuse?” but I don’t harbour the suspicion that the clergy are strange, even predisposed to paedophilia, simply because of their vows of celibacy. To me, this has never even been a question. The nuns and monks I knew were not odd or “other”. I would no more expect a monk or a nun to abuse a child in the absence of a partner than I would any other person to do so. I also feel pity for those good Catholics I know who believed in their leaders and have been failed by them. Who now discover that the Church to which they belong and trusted and believed in has done great wrongs. I also feel for those good clergy who will for many years be figures of suspicion. I’m not alone in this view. Tom Smith, 28, a lawyer who attends the Jesuit Church of the Immaculate Conception, in Farm Street, Mayfair, West London, says: “I feel sorry for the victims of the abuse, of course, but I also do feel sorry for those priests who have done nothing wrong but who now, through no fault of their own, might be regarded with suspicion, or even hostility. I have heard of priests who have been shouted at for wearing a dog-collar.” So what to think of the Church now? My father is optimistic. “I think that this could be a wonderful chance for it to reform; for its good to come to the fore and the evil — I use that word advisedly — to be removed,” he says. “It is a chance that, if it is to survive and thrive, the Church should take. In the main it is not an evil institution; it consists of good, kindly men and women working to do good.” None of those Catholics to whom I speak sees this as a reason to doubt his or her faith. “You have to look at the whole picture,” Smith says. “Priests, monks and nuns do a tremendous amount of good in the world.” “This hasn’t ‘shaken’ my faith,” says Frankie Lynch. “Why would it? If you told me that a teacher had abused a child, I would think that was a terrible thing. But it wouldn’t change my faith in education as an institution. I would still believe in that.”
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