Maureen Messent: Cardinal Keith O’brien Furore Must Force Vatican to Open Its Eyes

By Maureen Messent
Birmingham Mail
March 1, 2013

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/news-opinion/maureen-messent-cardinal-keith-obrien-1691108

Cardinal Keith O’Brien

Were I a simpleton believing shock headlines and doom-laden news bulletins, I’d get the idea the Roman Catholic Church ‘is in crisis’ and has been shattered by the resignation of Cardinal Keith O’Brien.

That isn’t the case. What we are seeing here is an epidemic of selective media indignation.

Indeed, this is an excuse for wheeling out the old adage of events turning out all for the best.

The church isn’t in crisis, simply realising that great change has been forced on it.

Had the Pope not been resigning, it is likely that the cumbrous and slow-moving Vatican would not have moved against O’Brien for months.

Then, after his retirement, a few months would have elapsed, at which stage, out of the blue, the Vatican, with O’Brien now safely retired, would have told us that accusations of inappropriate behaviour had been made against him.

That would have been the plan.

Rome knew it was hog-tied this time. The accusations couldn’t be shelved for future attention because not even the Vatican could allow a Cardinal under suspicion to vote at a Conclave.

For the first time, perhaps, the Vatican, silent as the Kremlin when it feels vulnerable, had its papal hand forced: instead of its usual iron control, it was itself controlled by events that couldn’t be silenced.

Therefore, it had to order O’Brien’s resignation.

Storm in a teacup? Not at all.

The old bureaucrats of the Vatican will have been left winded – don’t forget they’ve spent careers ensuring the Roman Catholic laity know of their superiors only what good for them. There is much of this story still to emerge, many think.

Perhaps the complaining priests have been infuriated at O’Brien’s confrontational line against gay marriage and adoption. Could it be that they have incubated their malice over the years because they are themselves perhaps homosexuals?

They saw him as a hypocrite.

Thus they would feel outrage at O’Brien’s condemnation of homosexual and lesbian lifestyles because they know that he himself – allegedly – behaved inappropriately, which can imply whatever the complainants wish.

The leaking of this story at this time completely alters the nature of the Conclave.

It rules out a black pope: the Africans are all discounted now because they are known to be unsympathetic to homosexual issues.

Since the O’Brien incident makes it impossible for the Curia (the Church’s ruling council) to continue to ignore the place of homosexuals in the modern Church, the new Pope must be an Italian wise to the cunning and time-wasting of the Curia which believes all ills will pass if left alone and unmentioned.

And out goes the South American cardinals. They, too, are anti-homosexuality.

Besides that, many of them are close to the rather sinister Opus Dei organisation: just let’s say that few parish priests want Opus Dei members muscling-into parish affairs.

The South Americans, too, would be lost when it came to knocking Curial heads together in a move to a cleaner and leaner hierarchy world-wide.

The ecclesiastical genie is out of the bottle.

Is it any wonder that Benedict, old and ailing yet all too aware of how events in Scotland would bring him heartache and a bitterly-contested near-reformation, decided enough was enough?

O’Brien himself (known as ‘Bruiser’ for his short temper and habit of scolding his clergy in stentorian tones) is the small beer in this sex ‘n’ sacerdotal saga.

He is alleged to have made an ass of himself with inappropriate behaviour, but let’s not stone him.

He’s not a child-molester, not a child-groomer. He hasn’t had his collar felt for playing with pornographic photographs.

When he was ordained, he promised to lead a celibate and chaste life: the problem, of course, is that the sacrament of Ordination doesn’t make men eunuchs.

Like, the sacrament of marriage, it can’t eliminate weaknesses.

Are we, as Christians, to believe that O’Brien is now an untouchable because, three or four times, he allegedly ‘behaved inappropriately’, yet forgive our future king for years of adultery with the wife of a fellow-officer and friend while he was breaking his marriage vows to Diana?

O’Brien, said to be bitterly ashamed both of his idiocy and his failure to apologise and come clean, is a sad figure.

But his ‘sins’ are small-time, the result, perhaps, of one over the eight.

His actions could become the catalyst that forces the Vatican to rethink its place in the world.

It must open its doors and windows, then sit like Jesus at the well with the Samaritan woman, shunned by her neighbours, but forgiven by Our Master.

Above all – although this is unlikely to comfort O’Brien – consider the irony of this event.

The Roman Church, the most secretive of all religious institutions, has had to blow the whistle on itself.