Rules won't restore the Church

By Chris Mcgillion And Damian Grace
Eureka Street
July 22, 2014

http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=41728#.U85LxPldWSo

It is widely assumed that rules are the solution to transgressions such as those being investigated by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Rules without doubt are useful. They can be framed to aid compliance and deter wrongdoing. It is no argument against them to say that people will still offend, but if rules are more legal requirements than the expression of genuine morality, they will have limited effectiveness.

The most desirable form of social control is self-restraint — the work of morality. For a minority of people, morals do not have this effect, but pathologising normal conduct because we are fearful that deviants are impervious to morality and law is no way for free people to live. Indeed, moral counsel and tighter regulation are wasted because they do not work on the very people at whom they are directed. Instead, barriers are raised to protect children that distort normal responses and have their own abusive aspect.

When teachers in New South Wales, for instance, were forbidden to touch children, even to comfort them, because a few teachers had abused their office, it was the children who bore the consequences. The lesson teachers took from this regulation was that they were not sufficiently trusted to comfort distressed children. Because of an aberrant few, all teachers were regarded as suspect, and distressed children lost the comfort of a responsible adult.

This response was disproportionate and eventually came to be seen as such by the authorities.

Trust was nonetheless eroded not only by the actions of abusers but also by those seeking to protect children from abuse. Representing formal accountability as more reliable than personal trust actually destroys trust, first by making it very much a second best option when a system of checkable procedures is available, and then, as a consequence, suggesting trust is less safe than documented dealings.

The default position with others becomes distrust. If you can 'see' what everyone else is doing, there is no need to trust them.

Moreover, the effectiveness of accountability is diminished by familiarity — vigilance has its limits — and volume: too much documentation and oversight makes the aim of accountability difficult to secure. Volume can reduce information to mere data.

Resources for policing misconduct are limited but one of the great assets of a civil society is trust. While giving due regard to the protection of the vulnerable, it is important to do so in ways that preserve trust. In providing regulatory protection for children, too much confidence should not be placed in rules, procedures and surveillance. Care should be taken to avoid creating an environment in which social trust eventually falls away.

Understandably, this is not the main consideration of those who wish to protect children, and many Catholics would now prefer systematised accountability to the State to trusting the Church and relying on the personal virtue of clergy. Discussions (around the time of the announcement of the Royal Commission) of breaching the seal of confession (to extract relevant information from priests) were an early indication that such measures have come to seem reasonable.

Other measures would tie State funding of Church activities, such as welfare, schools and hospitals, to compliance with designated standards. It would not be sufficient for, say, a hospital or school to meet the professional standards of the health and education professions. Funding for such entities could conceivably be tied to the Church complying with various bureaucratic agendas, such as parish priests keeping records of all interviews with parishioners and submitting these records for audit.

It is not fanciful to suggest that reformers of the Church, both within it and outside it, see change in terms of a more regulated and accountable operational environment. Oddly, perhaps, they wish to see a less Roman but more bureaucratic Catholic Church.

The kind of structural and cultural reform most often demanded is bureaucratic and unlikely to maintain, let alone restore, the Church's traditional function in society. The counter-cultural force of the Church historically has been tied to its spiritual mission, its conception of itself not in organisational terms but as the people of God in pilgrimage.

This conception of the Church is threatened by forces hoping to make it conform more closely to a standard bureaucratic system. Forcing the Church to adopt stricter accountability processes might satisfy the demands of a bureaucratic model, but also have the effect of further reducing its responsiveness and spontaneity.

Police checks, convoluted procedures and regular audits have already encroached upon the functioning of workplaces and public institutions such as schools, hospitals and universities. The presumption is that these places are unsafe unless a sheaf of documents certifies otherwise. Is a more cautious, risk averse and procedural church what most Catholics want?