LONDON (ENGLAND)
The Tablet
August 28, 2018
By Edward Kendall
‘The Church has experienced a paradigm shift in which PR-speak has lost any power it might once have had to reassure’
The Provost of the London Oratory has said recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse has further “hobbled the church’s mission of evangelisation”.
Father Julian Large, former Fleet Street journalist and Provost of the London (or Brompton) Oratory writes that “the recent Grand Jury report on sexual abuse in America details events of such wickedness and depravity as to leave the most cynical tabloid reporter shaken.”
“That pastors who have been ordained to be the living image of Our Lord and Saviour on earth could deliberately do such harm to those little ones whose angels behold the face of their Father in Heaven defies words,” Father Large says in his most recent pastoral letter. He adds that the “resulting crisis of credibility which has hobbled the Church’s mission of evangelisation in recent decades can only have been exacerbated wherever the institutional response has been to issue defensive official statements crafted by expensive lawyers and spin doctors.”
“With the latest revelations, and the promise of worse to come, the Church has experienced a paradigm shift in which PR-speak has lost any power it might once have had to reassure,” he continues.
In light of such revelations the temptation for many might be to leave the Church. But Father Large reminds his readers that despite “the transgressions of Her members” the Catholic Church remains “the Mystical Body of Christ, founded by Our Lord Jesus Christ for the salvation of mankind. She is where we find saving truth in its fullness, and where we encounter Our Lord in the Sacraments and receive Him in His entirety in Holy Communion.”
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