23 August 2018

Clerical child sexual abuse: Saying sorry is not enough 

The Tablet

Shocking stories about allegations of child abuse by Catholic clerics are piling up almost as regularly as public apologies and confessions of shame by church leaders. The latest, by Pope Francis, comes in a letter to the entire Catholic faithful worldwide, in which he admits, “We showed no care for the little ones; we abandoned them.”
The Pope lays the blame for these terrible crimes at the door of “clericalism”, but that ideology is still deeply entrenched throughout the Church and there is little evidence of it being overturned. Indeed, the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, was publicly lamenting the weakness of the institutional response to clerical child abuse just before the Pope’s letter was published. Francis “really needs a better, stronger and more robust team around him”, he said. The Vatican commission dealing with the matter was “not getting its teeth into where it should be”.

But it is not just in the Vatican that things have to change. The structures in the Church that permit or facilitate abuse must be broken down “and broken down forever everywhere”, Archbishop Martin says. It is “not enough just to say sorry”. Pope Francis is due in Dublin at the weekend and there should be an interesting conversation between them.
Meanwhile, another day, another scandal, this time in Pennsylvania. The results of a grand jury investigation into a thousand credible complaints of the sexual abuse of children by some 300 church personnel over seven decades, found that many could have been stopped had local bishops taken the necessary action. It can be assumed that the picture that the grand jury described could be generalised across the remainder of the United States.
At first glance, Pope Francis’ call for repentance and penance, including prayer and fasting, by the entire People of God might seem an appropriately drastic response. But it is undermined by the very clericalism he so deplores. The victims of clerical sexual abuse and its cover-up are almost without exception lay people. Why should they do penance for the “sins of the fathers”? They also include victims of another kind – parents who feel they failed to protect their children; abuse survivors’ common experience of disturbed and damaged relationships later in life; and a lifetime of pain and unhappiness which has affected all around them. It is no exaggeration to say that the entire Catholic laity has suffered to some degree – not least in their spiritual lives – from the crimes of abusing priests and the failures of the hierarchy to deal with them. The laity are not the perpetrators; they are the victims.
This makes the Pope’s visit to Dublin this weekend all the more problematical. Its purpose is to join in a celebration of family life. But families come in all shapes and sizes in modern Ireland, and the organisers have drawn their definition far too narrowly. Families not conforming to the traditional pattern have been turned away. Patriarchy, misogyny and homophobia have no place in the modern family and they should have no place in the modern Church. It is shocking to see them tolerated at this Dublin event.
There are many good things about family life in Pope Francis’ 2016 exhortation Amoris Laetitia, and he can be relied upon to repeat them during his brief visit. But spectacular events like papal visits rarely change things permanently, and the after-glow quickly fades when the crowds return home and the bills come in. The reconstruction of Irish Catholicism, if it to is happen, will be a long, hard process.
Archbishop Martin’s call for the structures in the Church that harbours abusers “to be broken down for ever” could mark the beginning of a new era. But what is the right theological blueprint for a reformed Church? Flawed theology and ecclesiology have had their part to play in past mistakes. The “perfect society” model of the Church, which was implicit in the Catholic Ireland of 50 years ago, imagined that it was entirely self-sufficient, containing within itself everything it needed to thrive, in spite of human failings. Pope Benedict’s outspoken rebuke to the Irish Catholic Church in his 2010 pastoral letter was essentially of this kind – he complained that the Irish bishops should have made more use of canon law in dealing with accused priests. The Church was still seen as a self-sufficient society, which is why it took so long for the truth to sink in that it really could not be trusted to police itself. It was the Nolan Commission in England and Wales which led the way in making it a firm rule that all allegations of abuse had to be reported to the civil authorities and taken out of the Church’s hands. But this is still not general policy throughout the Church. Belief in the Catholic Church’s self-sufficiency still prevails, not least in the Vatican.
The “Mystical Body of Christ” model of the Church, which has largely superseded the “perfect society” model, also sees the Church as essentially sinless, with the sacraments available for individual members who fall short of the ideal. It, too, is a thoroughly clericalised conception, emphasising the spiritual wellbeing of priests, and hardly recognising the emotional needs of the victims of abuse. Both these models are still influential in the Irish Church. The Nolan Report made English and Welsh bishops answerable to child protection agencies led by independent, professionally qualified lay people. This breached the “mystical body” principle, by which bishops were sovereign in their own dioceses and answerable only upwards, to the vicar of Christ, and not downwards to their own people, or outwards to secular agencies. In contrast, the Nolan rules were only compatible with a post-Vatican II “People of God” theology of the Church.
Pope Francis offers a refreshing vision of a Church in which the pyramid of power and authority is stood on its head, with the Holy Spirit acting in the Church from below rather than only from above. The Catholic Church in Ireland is in such a mess, and daily becoming more so, that it has much to gain and little to lose from radical experiments in the spirit of Francis’ call to transformation. The People of God need appropriate structures to hold them together in communio, but not the same structures that have let them down so badly in the past. The laity must lead, and must be given the freedom to do so. They are willing; they have the talent and the energy, the imagination and the inspiration. Revolutions have started in Dublin before. Could another one start in Dublin this weekend?