OTTAWA (CANADA)
Canadian Catholic News
Nov. 18, 2019
By Michael Swan
When Archbishop Anthony Mancini of Halifax-Yarmouth visits his old friend Sister Nuala Kenny, he likes to find a chair and get comfortable.
“I will be sitting in a chair and she will be walking and talking. Nuala is a lecturer. She’s a person who speaks to an audience of one or an audience of 500, it doesn’t matter,” said Mancini.
“She brings insights to the conversation. … She doesn’t have a lot of time for chit-chatting. You know, she never talks about the weather. I don’t think she even notices it.”
Mancini and Kenny worked together for years hashing out revised guidelines for Canada’s bishops on handling sexual abuse by priests. In fact they worked on Protecting Minors from Sexual Abuse: A Call to the Catholic Faithful in Canada for Healing, Reconciliation, and Transformation for far longer than Kenny would have liked.
“She said, ‘What the hell? Why is it taking so long?’ ” he recalled.
The committee’s work was done in the spring of 2017 and the document was in bishops’ hands in time for their fall plenary meetings. But the new Canadian guidelines didn’t resemble abuse policies in the United States or anywhere else in the world — which made some bishops nervous. They decided not to vote on them. By 2018, after the Pennsylvania grand jury report and Pope Francis’ Aug. 20 Letter to the People of God, Canada’s bishops had to act.
Kenny knows not all bishops want to hear what she has to say on sexual abuse. Not because they don’t care and not because they think she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s because they’ve faced calls for radical, root-and-branch solutions from all quarters for 30 years. Root and branch is hard to do.
“They’re tired. We’re all tired,” Kenny told a small, largely academic audience that turned up for the Toronto launch of her new book on the abuse crisis, Still Unhealed: Treating the Pathology in the Clergy Sexual Abuse Crisis.
For 30 years — longer than anyone else — Kenny has been in the business of figuring out how and why a Church that claims to be founded on the radical compassion of Jesus could tolerate and even foster abuse.
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