By Deborah Gyapong
B.C. Catholic
December 7, 2010
http://bcc.rcav.org/component/content/article/1-latest-news/343-pontifical-irish-college-rector-ponders-pieta-in-light-of-sexual-abuse-crisis
 |
| Deputy Speaker of the House Andrew Scheer with Msgr. Liam Bergin, rector of the Pontifical Irish College. Photograph by: Deborah Gyapong / CCN. |
When the rector of Rome’s Pontifical Irish College ponders the devastation left by the sexual abuse crisis in Ireland, he remembers Michelangelo’s Pieta, of “Our Lady holding her dead son.”
Msgr. Liam Bergin describes the statue, housed in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, is an image of “great brokenness” but notes that the Blessed Mother is in no hurry, as she is “holding and loving her dead son,” to give up his body to Joseph of Arimathea for burial.
“We proclaim Christ who died and rose again,” he said in an interview in Ottawa, where he participated in the rededication of the Sean O’Sullivan Room on Parliament Hill Nov. 24. “We have to stay with people who are suffering.”
And that means staying with the people who have been gravely harmed by sexual abuse. “There’s no quick fix to child sexual abuse,” he said. “People have been greatly hurt and damaged.”
“They need our prayers and support,” he said. “We need to be with them and for them.”
The Irish College will be part of the “triple visitation” Pope Benedict XVI asked for in his letter last March to the Catholics of Ireland. The visitation includes seminaries, dioceses and male and female religious orders.
New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan will be visiting the Irish College in the New Year, Bergin said. Two Canadian bishops, Toronto Archbishop Thomas Collins and Ottawa Archbishop Terrence Prendergast, have each been assigned to visit an Irish archdiocese.
“Child sexual abuse is an extraordinary crime and it is a terrible sin,” Bergin said. “That has to be stated.”
“The guilty must be brought to justice and vulnerable children taken out of harm’s way,” he said.
He pointed out the Holy Father had noted Irish Church has since developed protocols for the protection of children that are a model not only for Irish institutions but for churches elsewhere to follow. These may prevent further damage, but the scandal as had “a negative impact on the public image of the Irish Church,” Bergin said. It has caused a drop in the number of those who attend church, but Ireland still has a “huge number who still go” relative to other countries in Europe.
As rector of the seminary where priests come from all over the world to Rome for undergraduate training, Bergin said the scandal has also affected vocations from his home country.
“The young men who present themselves nowadays are very brave, very generous men to make commitments at this time,” he said.
On Dec. 8, the Irish College will be rededicating its chapel, now graced by new mosaic decoration designed by Jesuit artist Fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik and put in place by Centro Aletti.
Bergin said the college planned to take the motto “Building Christ’s Church New” for the next year as a response to the Pope’s letter, which called for a renewed commitment to the Gospel and a call to “live it bravely, heroically and prophetically in the 21st Century.”
He recalled how the Pope had asked the Irish Catholics to “remember the Rock from which you were hewn,” and to “look back and take courage” in what the Irish have done over the years.
The new mosaic features both the Irish saints the Pope mentioned in his letter, such as Saint Columbanus, who spread the Gospel throughout Western Europe and as a missionary even re-evangelized parts of Italy, Bergin said. The Pope also mentioned Sir Oliver Plunkett, the Archbishop of Armagh who was tried for treason on trumped up charges in 1681 and hanged, drawn and quartered.
Bergin noted the Irish College trains priests from places of Christian persecution such as Iraq or calamity such as Haiti, so the image of the Pieta helps him to understand a Church that is ministering to a suffering world, as well as one that ministers to individuals who suffer from disappointment, illness, bereavement, the effects of aging and tragedies in addition to the victimization of sexual abuse.
Ireland has also been hit with a financial crisis, leaving young married couples holding mortgages for homes that are now worth less than what they owe, Bergin said. “The Church has to be with them and support them.”
He noted how the world rushed into the support Haiti when the earthquake devastated the Caribbean nation last January, and is doing so again as news of a cholera epidemic hits the news. “The Church is there in Haiti, holding the brokenness and death as Mary held her dead son.”
“When the Church has stood close to the Cross, the Church has always grown stronger because the Church has been purified and refocused its gaze on Jesus Christ who is the Rock on which we stand,” Bergin said.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.