The Irish Affliction, by Russell Shorto, New York Times, February 9, 2011

The Irish Affliction

By Russell Shorto
New York Times
February 9, 2011

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Irish-t.html

Churches in Ireland, like St. Mary’s Cathedral in Kilkenny, have had a decrease in Mass-goers.

Andrew Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse of Ireland's economy were shaking the country, and throughout much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and a half.

Madden has recounted his tale many times for the Irish media, and there was a rote, dutiful quality to the recitation of the details. It wasn't until we pulled up in front of the house where Father Payne had lived — the scene of the abuse Madden endured, to which he had not returned since his teens — that he tensed with what seemed like deeply coiled anxiety and whispered, "Oh, my God."

My afternoon with Andrew Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout — personal, social and political — from the crash and burn of the Celtic Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

Of the various crises the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one — wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of children by priests and other church figures — has affected Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009 of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning Ireland's entire history as an independent country, and the efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests in public and demands that the government and society disentangle themselves from the church.

This past December a fresh bout of fury was touched off by the publication of the investigation into perhaps the worst clergy sex offender: the Rev. Tony Walsh, who raped and molested children while serving as a priest in Dublin and who was shielded by the Vatican even after Irish Church officials wanted him defrocked. Yet another large-scale report will be released shortly. And a 1997 letter — in which the papal nuncio to Ireland told Irish bishops that the Vatican had "serious reservations" about a plan for mandatory reporting of clergy sex-abuse cases to the police — came to light last month, causing further anger.

Among those who were most outraged by the abuse reports were people in their 20s and 30s, who came of age during the economic upswing and who grew up in a newly secular culture without a sense of obedience to the church. "When I saw the reports, I thought, I can't even pretend to be part of this club anymore," says Grainne O'Sullivan, a 32-year-old graphic designer. Late in 2009, together with a Web developer named Cormac Flynn and a civil servant in Cork named Paul Dunbar, she began a Web site, CountMeOut.ie, which walked Catholics through a three-step process for formally defecting from the church. It was to be, she said, "a way of protesting, using their own process against them." Over the next several months, CountMeOut became a focal point of anger at the church; 12,000 people downloaded the official form for defection — "Defectio ab Ecclesia Catholica Actu Formali" — from the site.

Then last August, the Vatican introduced a change in canon law that will apparently make it impossible for Catholics to defect. Flynn, O'Sullivan and Dunbar have thus suspended their service. But the Web site continues to be a clearinghouse for information on the church in Ireland and its abuses, and it has helped start a debate on Irish identity — on the possibility of separating the two parts of the term "Irish Catholic."

Certainly many Irish people find the idea of abandoning Catholicism to be as counterintuitive as giving up their racial or sexual identity. A televised panel discussion on the abuse crisis last summer ended with a reporter asking a woman who was voicing her anger if she was ready to leave the Catholic Church. She paused, as if befuddled, then said, "Where would I go?" Then again, while until recently, being a member of the church had obvious social rewards, Eamon Maher, who has edited books about Irish Catholicism, told me, "now it's a positive disadvantage." Maher continued: "If you go around saying you're an ardent Catholic, people will be distrusting of you."

Ireland's move away from the Catholic Church began before the reports were released. Between 1974 and 2008, regular Mass attendance dropped by some 50 percent. The situation today highlights a problem that is looming for the Vatican, especially in the West, as the global sex-abuse crisis, coupled with the increasingly conservative rule and top-down control that have prevailed since the 1970s, is contributing to the departure of populations the church once considered foundational. "Ireland is a prime example of what the church is facing, because they made this island into a concentration camp where they could control everything," Mark Patrick Hederman, abbot of Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in County Limerick, told me. "And the control was really all about sex. They told you if you masturbated, it meant you were impure and had allowed the devil to work on you. Generations of people were crucified with guilt complexes. Now the game is up."

To reach the geographical heart of Irish Catholicism, you leave the main road in windswept County Donegal and drive through miles of gorsy heath, past sheep poised on gray knuckles of rock, until you come to Lough Derg, a wilderness lake edged with pines. Half a mile offshore lies Station Island, where according to legend, St. Patrick had a meditative epiphany in the fifth century, during his mission to convert the Irish.

Station Island has been a place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages. Its director, Prior Richard Mohan, who has worked there since 1974, greeted me as I stepped ashore, while a brewing autumn storm roiled the tea-colored water of the lake. Over lunch in the staff dining room, he told me how he has modernized the pilgrimage center. Early pilgrims relived the saint's experience of huddling in a pit in the ground. Today there are updated dormitories, showers, even a gift shop. Prior Mohan said that Station Island "is in the genes of the Irish people," so much so that there is a phrase for making the pilgrimage: going in on Station. Indeed, Ireland's greatest living writer, the Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney, devoted what is perhaps his most beloved collection, "Station Island," to a meditation on the pilgrimage, the Irish and their tug of war with the church.

Mohan reckoned that the island's impressive number of visitors — more than 20,000 a year — actually relates to a drop in church attendance in Ireland. Many people have abandoned the institutional church but not their faith, so they come to this wild spot in an effort to plug directly into their historical religious tradition without the mediation of the church. "This is seen as independent," he said. In fact, the Catholic Church maintains control over the island, as it does over dozens of such places around the world.

Over the course of the 20th century, Station Island became a symbol of the way that Catholicism rooted itself in the Irish nation. Politics at the beginning of the century centered on two debates: British rule and religion. There were those — like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, "In the name of the most holy trinity."

Thus the 20th-century image of "Irishness" came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church. The archbishops of Dublin became something like grand inquisitors, wielding great power. The church's heavy influence on Irish society kept the wider world at bay for a surprisingly long time. Eamon Maher told me that in the 1970s, his parents found it profoundly disorienting when the evening recitation of the rosary suddenly had to compete with American shows like "Dallas," and "the world of wealth, flash cars and extramarital affairs." Contraception was illegal in Ireland as recently as 1980, and until 1985 condoms were available only with a prescription.

As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country's structure. In 1977, Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him "that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only one left — and that it should stay that way" and that he should not "change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state." That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, "In no other European nation — with the obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state."

According to Abbot Hederman, the hierarchy of the church in Ireland believed that the nation had a special role as a kind of citadel of Catholicism: "Ireland was meant to be the purest country that ever existed, upholding the Catholic ideal of no sex except in marriage and then only for procreation. And the priest was to be the purest of the pure. It's not difficult to understand how the whole system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact was a complete culture. Because you had people with no understanding of their sexuality, of what sexuality even was, and they were in complete power."

The sexual mistreatment and corporal punishment that went along with the code of purity were hidden in plain sight all along. A careful reader of James Joyce's "Dubliners" knows this is part of Ireland's cultural past, but violence in church-run schools was tolerated late into the 20th century. The novelist Colm Toibin, who was in a Christian Brothers school until age 15, told me: "At times it didn't feel like there was a line between sexual abuse and corporal punishment. Every Friday one of the brothers would take a boy in front of the class, and whichever way he hit you he'd always put his hand on your testicles. We would laugh, but in fact you were in a permanent state of fear. I would vomit in the morning before going out to school. They would hit you across the face if you got a sum wrong. I suppose they did teach me to read and write and that I should be grateful, but I'm not."

The changes taking place in Ireland have global ramifications for the Vatican, which has been beset by controversies. Some could be traced back to Pope Benedict XVI himself and his tough conservative style, which has struck many Catholics as insensitive and out of touch, including his suggesting in a speech in 2006 that Islam is inherently violent; his reinstatement of an excommunicated bishop who denied the Holocaust; and his decision to bring back into usage a prayer for the conversion of the Jews.

But the global sex-abuse scandal is of a different order entirely. Americans may be inured to the saga; in the United States, cases made news starting in the 1980s, and a 2004 report enumerated some 11,000 abuse allegations covering 95 percent of the Catholic dioceses in the country. But for other parts of the world, the story is newer, and it is seen as being less about sex than about the church hierarchy's ideas of holding and wielding power. Last year, the scandal swept across Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. There have been highly publicized cases in Britain, Italy, France, Malta, Switzerland, Austria, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Kenya, the Philippines, Australia and other countries. Nearly all involved systemic efforts to cover up the abuse and protect abusers. Last March, the scandal pointed toward the pope himself, when it emerged that as archbishop of Munich he was informed of a decision to return a pedophilic priest to church duty and then that as Cardinal Ratzinger he failed to heed the pleas of American bishops who asked the Vatican to defrock a priest in Wisconsin who molested 200 deaf children between the 1950s and 1970s.

The Vatican's repeated efforts to deal with the scandals seem to bring only further outcry. During his Christmas greetings, Pope Benedict touched off another global storm by suggesting that the wider Western culture had normalized pedophilia. In the estimation of Peter Nissen, a Vatican-watcher and professor of the cultural history of religion at Radboud University in the Netherlands: "This is the largest crisis the Catholic Church has faced since the French Revolution, and in a way you could say it is even worse. In those days, the church was a victim of the crisis. Now she has caused the crisis herself."

In Ireland the stakes for the Vatican are tangible. The abuse reports have led to popular demands that the state disentangle the Catholic Church from the country's infrastructure. More than 90 percent of primary schools are under church patronage — even though they are state-financed — so that parents generally have no choice but to place their children in a school with what is called a Catholic ethos. Most public hospitals are also controlled by the church, which means that certain procedures that would be commonplace elsewhere have been problematic in Ireland. These include not just abortions — which in December the European Court of Human Rights decreed that Ireland must permit in cases where a woman's life is at risk — but also vasectomies, among others.

Nonetheless, Ireland is the first country to bring the force of its federal government to bear against the church, according to Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was once a canon lawyer for the Vatican embassy in the U.S. and later represented sexual-abuse victims and also served as an expert consultant to the Irish investigations. "There have been three commissions in Ireland, and all were government funded, all chaired by judges," he says. "In other places with a traditional Catholic presence and where there has been sexual abuse, there is intense interest in what is going on in Ireland. Quebec has now begun an investigation. There are signs of it beginning in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain and France." Ireland, then, provides a model for investigative legal action on a host of fronts.

Not surprisingly, the Vatican is trying to control the damage in Ireland. The pope has organized a team of top churchmen from outside the country, who are traveling through Ireland now and who will reportedly investigate not just its abuse scandal but also its system for training priests and running parishes. Martin Long, spokesman for the Irish Bishops' Conference, described this "visitation" as "an offer of assistance from the holy father, and it is welcome." But it, too, has angered many in Ireland, who say that it is precisely the sort of top-down approach that has put the church into its current state. The Rev. John Littleton, onetime head of the defunct National Conference of Priests of Ireland and a prominent Catholic voice in the country, said bluntly, "We don't need help from Rome." The Rev. Sean McDonagh, a leader of the Association of Irish Priests, which formed last year after the reports were published, suggested that to get at the root of the problem, the team of investigators "should begin by scrutinizing Rome's own handling of sex-abuse allegations."

The Rev. Donald Cozzens, an American priest who is one of the most-respected moderate voices on Catholic issues, outlined the church's wider problem in these terms: "I'm not aware of any major diocese in the world that has not had a sexual-abuse scandal, and I believe part of the problem lies with the very structures of the church. I don't want to say change would require a different pope or even a different culture, but it will require radical openness. We have to take an honest look at all the things that are in play. Is mandatory celibacy wise or even theologically sound?"

In proportion to its population, Ireland easily ranks as the country with the most reported cases of sex abuse within the church. It is second only to the United States in the total number of cases, despite a population approximately one-hundredth that of the U.S. Of the two reports published in 2009 detailing the findings of civil investigations, the so-called Ryan Report examined abuse in institutions that were run by the Catholic Church, while the Murphy Report detailed abuse within the Diocese of Dublin. The reports fill five volumes and run more than 2,500 pages. Sample entries from the Murphy Report include an account of a priest who digitally raped a girl during confession and then washed his hands in a bowl at the altar; a priest who probed a girl vaginally and anally with a crucifix; and a priest who routinely forced altar boys to drop their pants and beat them and then masturbated. The Ryan Report entries that detail the desolate existence of the mostly poor children in so-called industrial schools read like a cross between Charles Dickens and Dan Brown: "I was beaten and hospitalized by the head brother and not allowed to go to my father's funeral in case my bruises were seen" and "I was tied to a cross and raped while others masturbated at the side."

The Murphy Commission — headed by Yvonne Murphy, a circuit-court judge — noted in its report that as cases of abuse became public, church officials repeated the refrain that they had not dealt with abusers properly because they were on "a learning curve." The commission roundly dismissed that claim. The interests of church officials "were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets," the report concluded. "All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were subordinated to these priorities."

Maeve Lewis, executive director of One in Four, a counseling and advocacy center for victims of abuse, said that "on paper the church is now ahead of the state in putting policies in place to protect children." The Rev. John Littleton, the former president of an Irish priests' organization, agreed with this, saying that when a priest prepares to celebrate Mass at a church in Ireland today, he would never be alone with a server, provided the church's new guidelines for protecting children are implemented. Then again, Lewis said that based on her watchdog experience: "Many churchmen in fact feel very hard done by the reports. They don't accept the reports at all."

Martin Long, the Irish bishops' spokesman, told me that the church is not just paying lip service on the abuse issue. "Acknowledgments have been made that the actions of church representatives resulted in the institution being placed above the welfare of individuals," he said. He then went on, however, to restate the learning-curve theme, suggesting that church officials had shielded abusers at the expense of children because "the deviousness and level of duplicity that perpetrators of abuse exercised was not understood for a long time," a reading of the situation to which abuse victims have repeatedly reacted with scorn. Nevertheless, Long insisted that today things have finally changed: "The bishops get it, to use an Americanism."

Do the church authorities get it?

Last March, Pope Benedict issued a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, which was much anticipated as the Vatican's definitive response to the crisis. Beyond authorizing the visitation of churchmen from outside Ireland, the letter called on Irish Catholics to pray, to fast and to engage in "eucharistic adoration." When I asked Long what plans there are for rebuilding the Church in Ireland, he said that the pastoral letter "will be the core of the pastoral renewal." Bishop Eamonn Walsh likewise told me that the Irish bishops' plan for renewal will focus on prayer, fasting and alms-giving.

For a reaction to Benedict's plan for the country, I turned to a lifelong lay member of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Marie Collins is a 64-year-old native of Dublin. In 1960, when she was 13, she was hospitalized for three weeks at what was then called Our Lady's Hospital for Sick Children. The chaplain, the Rev. Paul McGennis, read to her in the evenings and played games with her, which evolved from touching her to, finally, digitally raping her. "I had no idea what he was doing, but I knew it was wrong," Collins said. "He might abuse me one night, then give me communion in the morning." Collins spent most of the ensuing years dealing with depression, anxiety and agoraphobia. In her late 30s, she finally talked about her experience, first to a doctor and then to the curate of her parish. She says he told her that what happened was probably her fault, that she may have tempted the other priest, but that he would forgive her. Her spiraling illnesses went on, while Father McGennis continued as a priest and an abuser. Ten years later, Collins wrote to the archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, who is now a cardinal. She says Connell told her that McGennis was a good priest and that she should not try to "ruin his life." Eventually, with the help of the police and despite intimidation from the church, she succeeded in having McGennis sentenced to prison. When the Murphy Report came out, it revealed that church authorities knew about McGennis's behavior starting in 1960, the year Collins was abused.

Collins told me that in the aftermath of the reports, she hoped that church officials would show accountability. Last year, the news broke that Cardinal Sean Brady, the highest-ranking Irishman in the Vatican, participated in the 1975 cover-up of the sex abuse of one of the Irish church's most notorious pedophiles, the Rev. Brendan Smyth. The cardinal considered resigning but decided he would stay in office. "That means the church here in Ireland is being led by a man who will not be accountable," Collins said.

Regarding the pastoral letter, abuse survivors said they were angered by the fact that the pope blamed the clergy sex abuse in part on the "secularization of Irish society," which Collins said is a far cry from accepting responsibility. "Prayer and adoration of the eucharist is fine," she said, "but we have had the pope on a number of occasions saying how shocked he is by revelations of abuse around the world. It's hard to take that seriously when we know that as Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he saw the abuse reports."

Events of the past two years have done to Marie Collins what the abuse itself could not: "I don't practice as a Catholic anymore," she said. "It's so hard to reconcile what the men at the top do with what Jesus preached."

One Sunday morning in late November, I wandered into the Capuchin Friary in picture-pretty Kilkenny just as its Gaelic-language Mass was beginning. The peach-colored walls were suffused with light, and there was what one would have to describe as a warm and true feeling of community among those gathered. Sexual abuse and debt crises seemed far away. As impressive as the decline in Irish Church statistics has been, the 40 percent or so of Irish Catholics who go to Mass regularly outpaces some other once-traditionally Catholic countries. Clearly a lot of Irish want a faith community. But what kind, and under what conditions?

The Rev. Tony Flannery, an organizer of the Association of Catholic Priests, told me he recently attended meetings about the future of the church with members of a rural parish. "These were Irish people of 60, 70, 80 years of age," he said. "And I was amazed at the radical nature of what they were saying. They want women more involved. They want to take their church back from Rome. The child-abuse business has shaken the Catholic Church structure here in a way I would never have felt possible in my lifetime. So for the likes of me, that's an upside to all that has happened. There's an openness now, among priests and laity."

I asked him if he thought the openness extended in any way into the hierarchy, and he laughed. "Oh, no," he said, "no indication of that at all."

Actually, one of the few high church officials anywhere who has attempted reform is Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin. Martin offered the Vatican resignation letters from two Irish auxiliary bishops who were named in the abuse reports. But Benedict refused to accept the resignations, then passed Martin over for promotion to cardinal. People who follow the Irish Church say the country's bishops have since shied away from the archbishop and are rallying around the pope and his team of outside "visitators."

The visitation itself is seen by many as another indication that the Vatican intends not to bring reform but to exert control. "If the Vatican wanted to do a credible investigation of sexual abuse," Thomas Doyle said, "they would not send archbishops and cardinals. These people — the church hierarchy — are the very people who have caused this problem."

The economic meltdown, meanwhile, may be playing to the church's advantage. Worries about lost jobs and pensions have taken precedence over concerns about the church's role in society. Last summer, there was talk of a plan to divest the church of its control of state-financed schools, but when I asked a Department of Education and Skills spokeswoman last month what the department was doing, she gave me only the Catholic Church's current position — that there is need for "reflection" on the issue — and actually referred me to the church for further information.

After the abuse reports were published in 2009, the public was outraged to learn the government earlier agreed to cap the church's liability in compensating abuse victims to what in 2009 was only about 10 percent of the likely total. Under pressure, Catholic orders last year agreed to increase that to 50 percent. Some of that money is contingent on the church being able to sell property in the midst of a financial collapse. The Irish taxpayer may still end up paying most of the church's tab.