On the Renunciation of the Petrine Ministry

This is a good, even a heroic decision by Pope Benedict. It is also one that makes perfect sense in hindsight, when we think of his visits to the tomb and relics of Pope St Celestine V, the thirteenth-century pope who abdicated, and Benedict's observation in 2010's Light of the World that, "if a pope clearly realises that he is no longer physically, psychologically and spiritually capable of handling the duties of an office, then he has a right, and under some circumstances, also an obligation to resign."

Although I'll be disappointed that we'll be deprived of Benedict's wisdom, I cannot but admire how he has been willing to break with centuries of practice in the face of reality: he is frail and the Church is a big ship that needs a healthy captain. In doing this, he has freed his successors from the need to shackle themselves to the mast, no matter how feeble they might be.

John Paul's determination to lead the Church right through his agony and to his death gave a powerful witness to the value of our lives and the missions we are given, but it can hardly be denied that in his final years the Church was somewhat rudderless. Benedict, I think, feels we do not need to relearn that lesson every decade or two, and recognises that modern medicine can keep him alive beyond a time when he can effectively lead.

His decision strikes me as a deeply humble one, too; always determined to be a teacher and an academic, he had leadership thrust upon him, and now he intends to leave the limelight altogether. I am fairly sure that once he enters Castel Gondolfo, and then a monastery in the Vatican, we'll hardly ever hear of him again. Unlike King Lear, or Mrs Thatcher, he won't hang around to undermine his successor. From being one of the most visible people in the world, he shall become one of the most invisible.

He leaves behind him a Church in far better shape than he found it, and in the fullness of time I'm certain his attempts to renew the liturgy and the episcopacy will be recognised, as will his strenuous efforts -- still unrecognised by so many -- to cleanse the Church after the abuse crises. A lot remains to be done on that, obviously, but Benedict’s work deserves credit.

His teaching, too, will I think be seen as a true gift to the world. For all his skill and erudition as a theologian, his writing has displayed a remarkably common touch; his Jesus of Nazareth trilogy is as notable for its clarity as its profundity and its engagement with current academic work, and his weekly audiences drew crowds far larger than those that attended the audiences of his perhaps more obviously charismatic predecessor.

He was tireless in his insistence that faith and reason worked in harmony, each depending upon the other, and on our need, as Catholics, to engage with the world in an honest and open way -- it's worth looking at his engagements with the Muslim world in the aftermath of the oft-misunderstood Regensburg lecture, and at his creation of the "Courtyard of the Gentiles" to engage with atheists and agnostics.

The media tended to get him wrong, I'm afraid, as indeed did many Catholics: Benedict is a thinker who needs to be engaged with, and for too many the instinctive response was automatic nodding or kneejerk rejection; he needed to be listened to carefully and to be pondered.

One of the most striking features about him was how he learned, and continued to learn, throughout his career whether as a young priest, a university professor, a bishop, or as Pope; a former doctoral student of his told me some months ago about how Benedict genuinely listens in a serious and profound way, and how he has always been notable for this.

That he seems to have been the member of the Curia who realised most quickly and took most seriously the abuse crisis is a prime example of this, such that it was no accident that in 2001 the whole area became his responsibility as head of the CDF -- before that he was theoretically responsible for overseeing how some cases were handled, but as Ireland's Dublin and Cloyne reports demonstrate, local bishops tended to be shy about telling Rome what was going on on the ground.* During his papacy we can think of how he's learned more and more about the need to engage with mainstream media and most recently social media online. He was correct when he described the internet as being less a tool that people use than an environment in which they live.

I think much will come from his encyclicals too, with Veritate in Caritas bound in time to be recognised as a profoundly important critique of modern capitalism. I think we can all agree that capitalism as we have it isn't quite working, and there aren't many coherent alternatives out there: Catholic Social Teaching may well point us in the right direction.

On possible successors, I'm always reluctant to speculate, given how Benedict himself was widely written-off entering into the last conclave; he had a lot of media attention through being one of the few cardinals known to the global press, but experienced Vatican-watchers felt that support for him in conclave was likely to stall at roughly half the number of votes he'd have needed to become Pope, and then fragment. With hindsight, of course, it all looks rather different.

That said, Irish bookmakers are offering odds on frontrunners, so I will say that while I like the look of Peter Turkson, Angelo Scola, and Christoph Schönborn, for me I really think Canada's Marc Ouellet is the one to watch.

Head of the Congregation for Bishops, he'll be the man best equipped to pick the Church's new leadership around the world, and is definitely in a Ratzingerian mould in terms of his views on culture, relativism, and the Church in Europe.

He really came onto my radar last year when he was the Pope's representative at the International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, moving people with his homilies and his presence at the Congress's opening and closing masses. There were no shortage of journalists and observers there at the time who thought that not merely was he there to represent the Pope, but that he could make a fine pope himself. It's hardly insignificant that he's disavowed any interest in being Pope himself, saying that he'd regard it as a nightmare appointment: the fact that he doesn't want the job may make him all the more attractive as a candidate. All the more papabile, if you like.

--- Originally posted at The Huffington Post, 12 February 2013.



___________________________________________________________________
* As David Quinn tried to point out to Diarmaid Ferriter on Prime Time last night, of the 46 cases Judge Murphy detailed of alleged abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin, not even one was sent to Rome as a disciplinary measure, whereas in connection with her second report, considering how complaints about 18 priests -- and one bishop -- were dealt with by the diocese of Cloyne, none were sent to Rome prior to 2005. What evidence there is refutes claims that Rome knew what was going on in the ground. It really didn't.

Confronting Abuse: Sailing Between Scylla and Charbydis

The seemingly unending sequence of increasingly grotesque revelations about Jimmy Savile that have followed in the wake of ITV’s 3 October broadcast of Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy has been sickening, but distressing though these stories have been, they give us an opportunity to face the reality of abuse that we would be foolish to surrender.  

Confronting abuse must be done honestly and calmly, however; it is too easy to set up lazy scapegoats or succumb to a witch-hunting mentality. 

Serious questions have, rightly, been asked of the BBC and other institutions with which Savile was linked. The question of whether Savile’s behaviour was deliberately ignored and even concealed is, as in the case of abusive clergy, perhaps the biggest question. “Monsters exist,” wrote the Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, “but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are… the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.” 

Savile

Some, with axes to grind against the BBC, have been eager to believe Savile’s behaviour was deliberately concealed, rather than being facilitated by a wish to believe the best of people and a refusal to face reality. Unfortunately, the media’s natural narrative dynamics contribute to this approach. “The trouble is that the media hates cock-ups as they dilute guilt,” observed Simon Jenkins in The Guardian last week, explaining “a mistake must be rendered a lie, a cover-up and a crisis, so that the cry can go up for heads to roll.”

Investigation

Investigation is clearly needed, but it would be a tragedy if sensationalist storytelling made the BBC an institutional scapegoat, bearer not just of its own sins, but those of a whole society. Child abuse is no more the primary preserve of the British establishment than it was that of the Irish Church, and while concentrating on the past failures of the BBC might make us feel better, it would really be just a form of denial, draining valuable attention and energy away from where they're most needed to acknowledge and tackle abuse across Britain today. 

Sue Berelowitz, Britain’s deputy Children’s Commissioner, reported to the Commons Home Affairs committee in June that sexual exploitation of children is rife throughout urban and rural Britain. Describing in graphic detail the pack-raping of young girls by adolescent males, she insisted that “people need to lay aside their denial”, so that victims can muster the courage to come forward, trusting that they will be believed.

The numbers seem to support Berelowitz’s statement: abuse rates cannot be compared precisely between different countries, as surveys ask different questions and use different definitions and methodologies, but it seems that Britain’s abuse figures are no better than Ireland’s. 

Twenty seven per cent of Irish adults had been victims of childhood sexual abuse, according to the 2002 SAVI stud, which suggests that abuse must have peaked before the 1990s. The NSPCC’s 2011 study, Childhood Abuse and Neglect in the UK Today, found that 24.1pc of British adults between the ages of 18 and 24 had experienced sexual abuse during childhood or adolescence; 65.9pc of the contact sexual abuse reported by those aged 17 and under having been perpetrated by under 18s.  

While we need, therefore, to recognise how widespread abuse is, we need to do so responsibly; there’s a narrow path between denial and hysteria, and the victims of child abuse and our need to tackle abuse as the social pollution that it is will not be well served by a moral panic. 

Dismissive 

People have generally been dismissive of claims by clergy that right through to the 1990s they simply didn’t understand the reality of child sexual abuse. It therefore seemed somewhat disingenuous of Savile’s Radio 1 colleague Paul Gambaccini to say, as he did last week, that it “was considered so far beyond the pale that people didn’t believe it happened”. 

He’s not been alone in saying this, but rather than sneering about double standards and hypocrisy among media types, maybe we should welcome this as a belated recognition that the sexual revolution unleashed a maelstrom of confusion in a more naive world.

In December 2010, Pope Benedict provoked fury from Sinéad O’Connor and others when he told the Roman Curia that, “In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorised as something fully in conformity with man and even with children,” but the evidence shows that Benedict was right.

Sexual liberation had been one of the great ambitions of the student revolutionaries of the late 1960s; a desire to banish sexual repression led to the establishment of several communes and kindergartens in Germany where sexual contact between adults and children was expected. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a prominent MEP, described himself in his 1975 book The Great Bazaar as engaging in sexual acts with very young children in one of these kindergartens.

Sexuality

In the mid-1980s, the German Greens’ state organisation in North Rhine-Westphalia argued that “nonviolent sexuality” between children and adults should generally be allowed, while a Green Party task force in Baden-Württemberg wrote in a position paper that “Consensual sexual relations between adults and children must be decriminalised”.

In Britain, on the other hand, the National Council for Civil Liberties – then headed by Britain’s eventual Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt, argued in 1976 that “childhood sexual experiences, willingly engaged in, with an adult result in no identifiable damage… The real need is a change in the attitude which assumes that all cases of paedophilia result in lasting damage.” 

The activist group called the Paedophile Information Exchange ubsequently became affiliated to the NCCL, campaigning for the age of consent to be lowered and opposing bans on child pornography. In the early 1980s the International Gay Association passed motions calling for an international solidarity campaign on behalf of the Paedophile Information Exchange and for the abolition of the age of consent.

Note that Peter says it may be impossible to condone paedophilia

Many of these would-be-liberators acted with sincere – if astonishingly naive – intentions.

The civil rights campaigner Peter Tatchell seems to be their natural heir, writing in 1997 that several of his friends had enjoyed having sex with adults when between the ages of 9 and 13; while not condoning paedophilia, he argued that society should acknowledge that “not all sex involving children is unwanted, abusive and harmful”.*

He’s not alone in arguing that sexual contact between adults and children isn’t always intrinsically harmful; Richard Dawkins writes in The God Delusion that he found being molested “an embarrassing but otherwise harmless experience”, and wonders whether it might be less damaging for children to be sexually abused than to be raised Catholic.

Attitudes to sexuality in the 1970s were chaotic, confused, and naive. Most of us have learned better, but although some of us have been slow to catch up, we need to remember that the past was indeed a different country, and they did things differently there. Blaming people for their historical naivety won’t help us fix today’s problems.

-- Originally published in The Irish Catholic, 1 November 2012.
___________________________________________________________________________
* In September 2010 Tatchell claimed that The Guardian edited his letter without his knowledge or consent, but I would be curious if he felt it was edited to a point where he felt that his views had been misrepresented, and if he can prove this. After all, it seems that he was willing to let thirteen years go by before he attempted to disown the letter as published. It's almost as though he was happy with it until people pointed out that he'd publicly said that for adults to have sex with children isn't always abusive, is sometimes wanted by the children, and can be utterly harmless and even enjoyable.

The Scourge of Abuse: Time to Face Facts

Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy, shown on ITV last Wednesday, will have horrified those for whom Jimmy Savile was a broadcasting institution. 

The programme alleged that the DJ and presenter of such shows as Top of the Pops and Jim’ll Fix It, famous for his eccentric lifestyle and having raised more than £40million for charity, was a sexual predator who regularly abused girls in their early teens. 

Savile, who died last October aged 84, obviously cannot defend himself against these allegations, but the programme’s presenter, former detective Mark Williams-Thomas, made a compelling case, interviewing a succession of middle-aged women who described how they’d been assaulted by Savile in their youth, as well as people who had witnessed Savile’s behaviour. 

Childline founder Esther Rantzen, a onetime BBC colleague of Savile, looked distraught as she said that she had no doubt that the women who had come forward to tell their stories were telling the truth. Admitting that people had blocked their ears to gossip about Savile, whose charity work had given him an almost saintly status, she said “In a funny way we all colluded in this… we in some way colluded with him as a child abuser.” 

BBC cover-up 

Some have been quick to speak of a BBC cover-up, and of a code of honour among ‘luvvies’, but neither gloating nor point-scoring will undo the harm that Savile did or prevent further abuse by others. 

The reality is that Savile hid in plain sight; colleagues, journalists, and even fans chose to turn a blind eye to his behaviour. 

His 1974 autobiography, As It Happens, describes how in the 1950s he had told a female police officer that if an attractive runaway from a remand home were to come to his club, he would return her to the police but only after keeping her overnight first as his ‘reward’. He did just that, and boasted that the officer’s colleagues had to dissuade her from bringing charges against him. 

Denial 

How could anybody have ignored this? Did they dismiss it as a laddish tall tale? It may simply have been that they didn’t want to believe it. Denial, sadly, is all too often our default response when faced with the reality of abuse. Our own history shows this all too bleakly. 

In 1930, W.T. Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal government appointed a committee under William Carrigan K.C. to consider if the Criminal Law Amendment Acts of 1880 and 1885 should be amended. The most shocking of the committee’s findings, submitted the following year, was that: 

“…there was an alarming amount of sexual crime increasing yearly, a feature of which was the large number of criminal interference with girls and children from 16 years downwards, including many cases of children under 10 years.” 

The police estimated that under 15pc of such cases were prosecuted, as it was difficult to establish guilt and parents felt it would be better for their children if such cases were kept secret. 

The Department of Justice recommended against the report’s publication, and Cosgrave’s government fell without having decided what to do; de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government set up an all-party committee to consider in confidence how to respond to the report’s findings, but nothing was done. 

It would be easy to dismiss the suppression of the Carrigan Report as emblematic of a less enlightened age, but things have scarcely improved over the last 80 years. Nowadays we don’t hide the truth; we just ignore it. 

In 2002 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published the findings of a massive study on sexual abuse and violence in Ireland. The SAVI Report found, among other things, that 27pc of Irish adults had been sexually abused as children, with half of these having never told anybody of their experiences. Of Ireland’s more than 780,000 adult survivors of childhood abuse, it seems that roughly 530,000 had experienced contact sexual abuse, about 120,000 having been raped. 

Family Circle 

SAVI also found that nearly 60pc of abuse survivors had been abused by people within the family circle including extended family, neighbours, and family friends, 4.6pc having been abused by their babysitters. Just under 1.7pc of abuse was committed by clergy, with a further 1.7pc by teachers who were members of religious orders. 

For every victim whose abuser had been convicted for their crimes, about 200 had never seen justice done. Almost two-thirds of abuse survivors had been abused while under twelve years old. 

So damning a report ought to have defined our national understanding of abuse, and shaped public policy for dealing with it, but instead SAVI’s impact has been negligible, Ireland’s media and politicians having averted their eyes from its findings. 

The current government has made loud noises about protecting children, but its actions have resembled those of generals fighting the last war. Much of the Children First Bill concentrates on abuse within organisations, when it seems that organisational abuse, while not a thing of the past, has already been greatly reduced. 

People generally recognise that most abuse takes place within the family circle, but few realise that relatively little contemporary abuse takes place elsewhere. In 2009 the Irish Times quoted a Garda Detective Sergeant fighting internet paedophiles with Interpol as saying that 85pc of child sexual abuse occurs within the family circle, and the Rape Crisis Network of Ireland revealed that 97pc of abuse survivors who had sought their help the previous year had been abused by people within their family circle. 

As much as a third of Ireland’s sexual abuse is committed by adolescents, but our popular narrative of abuse remains focused on the bogeyman figure of the ‘paedophile priest’, rather than on the teenage boy. 

People would rather believe that abusers are ‘out there’ rather than very close to home. Last September, Father Paddy Banville wrote in this paper that the problems of abuse and cover-up in the Irish Church reflected the problems of abuse and cover-up in Irish society; the ensuing furore was, in the words of the Irish Times critic at the time of the 1907 Playboy Riots, “as if a mirror were held up to our faces and we found ourselves hideous. We fear to face the thing.” 

It’s clear that people rationalise abusive behaviour,  believe that it’ll not happen again, play down the damage that was done, and say that whatever their loved ones may have done, they’re still their brothers, husbands, sons, or friends. Mercy, hope, loyalty, and trust conspire to drive our eyes from the crimes of those we love. 

We need to acknowledge this if we’re to have any hope of eradicating the scourge of abuse from Irish life. Addressing it in the Church has just been the beginning. It’s time to face facts. 

-- A version of this was originally published in The Irish Catholic, 11 October 2012.

The Shame of Cardinal Brady?

Well, having had a heads-up that it'd be on, and knowing that I'd be called upon to talk about it on the radio this morning, I watched the BBC's This World documentary, The Shame of the Catholic Church, last night. About abuse in Donegal's diocese of Raphoe, perhaps the most remote part of the country, and about how the Brendan Smyth investigation in the diocese of Kilmore was handled in 1975, it was a powerful piece of television.

I watched it with lips pursed, stomach churning, and eyes narrowed and at times tear-clouded; I can't imagine anyone else watching it without feeling upset, furious, even betrayed. I’m still distraught over it.

I know an enormous amount about abuse in Ireland, knowing quite a few abuse survivors extremely well, and having read several books, hundreds of articles, and all the national and a few international reports on the subject, and even so it was agonising to witness the suffering etched on the faces of Brendan Boland and so many others as they told their tales of the horrendous abuse they suffered at the hands of Eugene Greene and Brendan Smyth.

It was, in its weird way, inspirational too. Whenever I hear abuse survivors coming forth to talk of what was done to them, I'm always struck by their courage.

In the aftermath of last year's Cloyne Report, Archbishop Neary of Tuam preached the Reek Sunday homily on Croagh Patrick, in which he said:

'A woman asked me last week when it would all end. The honest answer is that it will not end until every survivor has told their story and until every victim is facilitated in embarking on their journey to real healing, where true dignity is accorded.'

In that sense, I have to say that I'm glad the BBC has made this documentary. It's afforded some people – some terribly, grievously, shamefully wounded people – the opportunity to tell their stories, and to be heard by millions. I only hope that doing so will help them in some measure towards healing, and will help others tell their stories too.

Misleading

That said, I have serious misgivings about the programme itself, which even while watching it and despite by general sense of disgust at what had happened, I thought was deeply misleading. Of course, Cardinal Brady's recently-issued statement  seems to suggest it was rather more than that.

It was, when you get down to it, two wholly separate documentaries – one on Greene and Raphoe, one on Smyth and Cardinal Brady's role in his investigation – bound together by some commentary, notably by Colm Tóibín, whose book The Sign of the Cross, taking him across Catholic Europe and deep into himself, is something well worth the readings.

The commentary gave the wholly false impression that the Catholic Church in Ireland is a monolith, whereas the reality – as I said yesterday – is that it's more like a loose network of 184 separate organisations, all in communion with each other but with nobody in charge and nothing remotely resembling a chain of command. This isn't a trivial point, because it's utterly crucial to understanding how the abuse phenomenon happened

As Ian Elliott, the Protestant Head of the Church's child protection agency said in 2007,

 'The task of organizing and motivating the whole Church to adopt and implement a single approach to any issue should not be underestimated. Authority is structured in such a way as to allow independence. No one person in Ireland can direct and require the various constituent parts of the Church to act or to follow one particular course of action. This simple fact helps to explain why it has been so difficult to implement a single strategy in the past or to apply across the whole Church the valuable lessons learnt from painful experiences.'

You'd not think, to watch the programme, that one of the people responsible in 1996 for having herded those 184 cats in such a way that the Irish Church collectively adopted the most stringent child protection procedures in the land was the then Coadjutor Archbishop of Armagh, Seán Brady. Granted, the groundwork must have been done by others, but I don’t think we can dismiss his contribution.

These are crucial errors of omission, but there were other errors too – clear factual errors. Notably the programme claimed that when it became news in 2010 that the then Father Brady had been involved in 1975 in an internal abuse investigation about the late Father Brendan Smyth, it was argued that Brady had just been an innocent notetaker. This enabled the programme to wheel out Father Tom Doyle O.P. to argue that this is nonsense, and that the transcripts of the investigation show that Brady was an investigator, even though, by Brady's own account, the transcripts explicitly identify him as a notary.

Now, leaving aside how the story originally broke in 1997, being reported on 10 August of that year in the Sunday Mirror, it simply wasn't argued in 2010 that Brady had merely been a passive notary. As my own account of the matter on my 18 March 2010 blogpost shows, it was widely recognised and never disputed that he'd participated in interviews, taken oaths, and presented findings as well as taking notes:

'Over the weekend it turned out that the current Irish cardinal, Sean Brady, had learned of Smyth's actions back in 1975. An ordinary priest at the time, Brady was a schoolteacher who had been trained in canon law. In this capacity in March and April 1975 he interviewed two teenage boys who had reported Smythe's behaviour, taking notes on the interviews and administering oaths that required the boys to confirm the truthfulness of their statements and to guarantee that they would preserve the confidentiality of the interview process.

Father Brady, as he then was, passed on his findings to his bishop, who made his decision – that Smyth's priestly faculties should be withdrawn and that he should receive psychiatric help – which he passed on to the superior of Smyth's order, the Norbertines. The Norbetines, as we know, utterly failed to enforce the order restricting his priestly role, simply moving him from place to place, and we all know what horrors ensued.'

Betrayal

Other than hearing the stories of the victims themselves, which stood as powerful witnesses to their extraordinary courage, the only new thing in the programme was the fact that during the first interview, that of Brendan Boland, the then Father Brady was given the names and addresses of possible victims. Of course, these would have been passed on to his superior, Bishop Francis McKiernan, but neither McKiernan nor Brendan Smyth's order, the Norbertines, acted to protect these people, with the terrible consequences we all know.

I think it's hugely unfair to blame Brady for not having contacted the families of those children directly, and for not having reported the matter to the police. That might sound crazy, but think of this: nobody, I hope, would ever accuse Brendan Boland's parents for having covered up or facilitated Smyth's abuse by not reporting it to the police. The reality is that the Bolands trusted Bishop McKiernan to handle the matter properly, and the then Father Brady did exactly the same thing.

Brady, in short, was as innocent as Brendan Boland’s parents, and I think his own account of what’s happened is well worth reading. He corrects what appears to be some serious errors in the programme.

I think the teenage Brendan Boland acted heroically in coming forward as he did. And I think he was horribly let down – even betrayed – by some in the Church, to some degree by the late Bishop McKiernan but most especially by Brendan Smyth's superiors in the Norbertine order. I don't think, however, that he – or Smyth's other victims – were betrayed by the then Father Brady.

I'd go further, in fact: I think Brady himself was betrayed, as he interviewed the boys, believed them, passed on his findings to his superior, and trusted in good faith that matters would be handled properly. And they weren't. It’s hardly surprising that he says he was horrified when he learned decades later that his findings had ultimately fallen on deaf or uncaring ears.

Leadership

That said, and I hate to say it, but I'm not convinced that Cardinal Brady really can carry on as the nearest thing the Church in Ireland has to a man at the top. Unfair it may be, but he's fatally tainted by his connection with the Smyth affair, such that it persistently undermines him. I'd not say that he should resign – that's for him, of course – but I'm just not convinced he can be the leader we need right now.

He's already effectively asked to be sidelined, of course, having requested that the Pope appoint either an assistant bishop or, depending on who you ask, a Coadjutor Archbishop – a regent, if you like – such that he could slip off the scene, and I'm not surprised. Although he's done a good job in pulling the Church's disparate elements together to implement common guidelines far tougher than those of the State, it's looked to me as though his confidence has been shot ever since this story was revived a couple of years ago.

I'm just not sure he can be the man to lead a renewal of the Irish Church. And that, I think, is yet another tragedy.

On Brian D'Arcy and Media Hysteria: Some Musings

If this rambles, it's because I'm just trying to get my thoughts straight on something. Feel free to join me on my journey...

Fintan O’Toole’s column today is a forlorn but functionally ignorant piece that disregards recent developments in the Irish Church and comments with scant regard for current context; while I have some sympathy for his views, they should, nonetheless, be taken with more salt than doctors generally recommend.

His general thesis is straightforward. Back in the day, had such priests as Fathers Brian D’Arcy, Tony Flannery, Gerard Moloney, Seán Fagan and Owen O’Sullivan been censured for saying what most Catholics actually think about celibacy, women priests and homosexuality, he would have written a column about the Church abusing its power. Such a column was, as he puts it, ‘a reliable old standby’, the kind of thing Fintan could have written in his sleep, and probably often did.

Nowadays, however, he just sighs. He sees what’s happened as a tragic and humiliation generation of a generation of priests who were full of hope and openness to the world, ‘infused with the energy of reform and renewal’.

Like a legion of lesser journalists, Fintan then turns to the cliché that is the abuse issue, something he has elsewhere recognised is not a Catholic issue or even a clerical one, and says:

‘This is the institution that told us that it was unable to control child rapists in its ranks because it couldn’t just issue orders... Remember the stuff about how bishops were lords in their own dioceses and religious orders were their own kingdoms?

When priests were raping children, the institutional hierarchy was wringing its hands and pleading “what can we do?” The Vatican was very busy and very far away. But when a priest makes some mild suggestions that women might be entitled to equality, the church is suddenly an efficient police state that can whip that priest into line. The Vatican, which apparently couldn’t read any of the published material pointing to horrific abuse in church-run institutions, can pore over the Sunday World with a magnifying glass, looking for the minutest speck of heresy.

An institution so stupid that it thinks its Irish faithful is more scandalised by Brian D’Arcy than by Brendan Smyth is not worth anyone’s anger. It is doing a far better job of destroying itself than its worst enemies could dream of.’

Hyperbole and nonsense, I’m afraid. Hyperbole and nonsense, without a shred of understanding of how things have changed, or any attempt to grasp why this is so.

A Network, not a Monolith

All the stuff about bishops being lords in their own dioceses and religious orders being their own kingdoms was true. Ian Elliott, the Protestant head of child protection for the Catholic Church in Ireland, put it well back in 2009 in a speech on child protection in the Irish Church:

‘Although it is described as a single Church, it is more easily understood as a single communion with close to two hundred different constituent elements. There is no one person who is resident in Ireland and holds the authority to direct all the various parts of the body to act in a particular way...

The most difficult issues for the Church to overcome are those that arise from its structure. It is the largest membership organisation on the island of Ireland with over four and a quarter million members. There are 1366 parishes, 2646 churches, 5069 priests, 942 brothers, and 8093 sisters. By any scale, it is a very substantial organisation. However, it is not a single body but rather a number of quite separate ones that are linked. There are dioceses, religious congregations, orders, missionary societies, prelatures, and religious institutions. In all, there are 184 different parts to the Church in Ireland and each has its own head. Many have their own constitutions and relate to head quarters located in Italy, France, the United States, or some other part of the world.’

Structurally speaking, then, the Irish Church is much better understood as a network rather than a monolith, with that network existing within the much larger network that is the global Church with its roughly 5,000 bishops, 400,000 priests, 750,000 sisters, 220,000 parishes, 5,000 hospitals, 17,500 dispensaries, 15,000 homes for the elderly, and so forth.

Of course, if people don’t believe Elliott, the man whose investigations in Cloyne led to John Magee’s ‘resignation’ and the subsequent Cloyne Report, they could look to the first national investigation of the institutional Church, that being 2005’s Ferns Report, which has a hugely informative section on the institutional structures of the secular diocesan priesthood; of course, I’ve explained all this at some length before.

A System Wholly Dependent on Honesty...

The crucial thing about Church structure that the Ferns Report rightly identified is that contrary to popular mythology it is incredibly decentralised, and communication is almost always a bottom-up rather than a top-down phenomenon. With the all-important exception of doctrine, given the teaching authority invested in the Pope as successor to Peter, the flow of information goes from the parishes to the dioceses and from the dioceses to Rome and does so on a voluntary basis: the quality and comprehensiveness of the information being supplied is wholly in the hands of the supplier.

Putting it another way, in the normal course of things the Pope knows only what the bishops choose to tell him, and the bishops know only what their priests choose to tell them.

This shouldn’t surprise us. Even if it were theologically appropriate to do, as John Allen, the most astute of Vaticanistas, commented last October, Rome simply doesn’t have the tools to micromanage the Church: the total workforce for the Church’s central bureaucracy is 2,170 people, who rely on a budget roughly half that of UCD’s to serve a Church of 1,200,000,000 Catholics.

Sadly, as we know from the two Murphy Reports, as well as interviews with the likes of Monsignor Charles Scicluna, who Marie Collins has described as someone who ‘gets it’ when it comes to the problem of abuse, an awful lot of important information has historically not been passed upwards or even sideways.

Indeed, in terms of abuse, it looks as though the tendency of the Church at a local level – at least during the sixties, seventies, eighties, and early nineties – has almost always been to deny its reality and to hide it from others in the Church. Everything was dealt with, as much as possible, in-house. And, of course, it was usually dealt with badly.

Enter the Visitation

In Mach 2010, in the aftermath of the first Murphy Report, the Pope wrote a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, in which he expressed great concern about developments in Ireland, saying that he was ‘deeply disturbed’ by what he had learned about the abuse of children and vulnerable young people, and shared in the ‘the dismay and the sense of betrayal’ that so many Irish Catholics felt on learning of what had happened and how the Irish Church authorities had dealt with reports of abuse.

He apologised to abuse victims for their sufferings, saying that he was truly sorry for the wrongs abuse victims had endured, the betrayal of their trust, the violation of their dignity, and the failures of so many in the institutional Church to listen to those courageous enough to speak out.

Commenting on changes within the Irish Church he talked of how traditional sacramental and devotional practices had been increasingly neglected, noted the increasing tendency of Irish priests to engage with the world without sufficient reference to the Gospel, and condemned Ireland’s bishops and heads of religious congregations for grave errors of judgment and failures of leadership, which – among other things – had seriously undermined their credibility and effectiveness.

Listing various actions the Pope was going to take in order to facilitate a renewal of the Irish Church – a renewal that ought to ensure that such horrors as the abuse crisis not happen again, the Pope announced that he was going to organise an inspection or investigation of the Church in Ireland.

‘Furthermore, having consulted and prayed about the matter, I intend to hold an Apostolic Visitation of certain dioceses in Ireland, as well as seminaries and religious congregations. Arrangements for the Visitation, which is intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal, will be made in cooperation with the competent offices of the Roman Curia and the Irish Episcopal Conference. The details will be announced in due course.’

In other words, the Pope announced that he no longer trusted the Irish bishops to tell him what was going on in Ireland, and so he would be appointing people to go in and find out directly. This, of course, is something that’s not normal practice. When Paul went to Corinth, Peter didn’t send a sceptical Thomas after him to check that he wasn’t hiding something, just as Jesus hadn’t chased after the Seventy Two to make sure they were doing their job. Nicholas I may have invited Cyril and Methodius to come to Rome, but he didn’t dispatch spies after them when they went back to the Moravia and Pannonia, and neither Paul III nor Julius III sent monitors to Indian and Japan to find out what St Francis Xavier was playing at.

It’s been reported that the Irish bishops sought to limit the terms of the Visitation to two issues, these being the handling of child abuse allegations, and the formation of future priests in seminaries. Rome, on the other hand, took the view that such serious problems in the Church were likely to by manifestations of other problems, possibly ones with very deep roots, and that a much wider investigation was needed.

The press release issued by the Vatican made it clear that the Visitation would home in on the abuse crisis, its interest was broader and deeper: it was, rather, ‘intended to assist the local Church on her path of renewal’, and would also have to ‘identify the explicit problems which may require some assistance from the Holy See.’

Following in the Footsteps of Giants...

Just over a month back, a summary of the Visitors’ report was published. It’s an extremely condensed version of a much larger document, which has been given to the bishops, which cannot be understood unless we read between the lines and recognise that it merely points towards things which will have to be worked on.

The essence of the document is that a renewed Church needs a renewed clergy and a renewed laity. In a sense, of course, this is always the answer. Here’s Westminster’s Archbishop Vincent Nichols, for instance, in his recent introduction to his four decades’ old study of the sixteenth-century bishop St John Fisher:

‘It is again popular to criticise the clergy. Has it not always been so? Of course now as then some of the criticism is justified. But its generalisation is not. Now as then there is much evidence of the untiring work of the majority of priests and those who assist them. There is ample evidence of the on-going formation of priests, of the resources and opportunities available to them. There is a need today, as then, to look at the facts of parish life rather than the popular impression.

‘It might also be a consolation to recall that in the fourteenth century too the question of clerical celibacy was contentious and its abolition proposed as a solution to many of the failings attributed to priests.

Fisher’s main effort in support of the clergy was in the area of education. He wanted a clergy that was better educated, thereby better able to inform and form itself for its important ministry. And in that ministry the task of teaching the faith was uppermost in his mind. He wanted his priests to be able and ready to study. He wanted them to bring the fruits of that study into their preaching. He wanted a laity that understood their faith and not be led astray by erroneous opinion and error.’

A well-educated laity wasn’t just something that was needed as error and confusion ran amok in the blaze of the sixteenth century. In his 1851 study, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, John Henry Newman famously wrote:

‘I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold, and what they do not, who know their creed so well, that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity; I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory.

I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion.’

Newman, famously, was a great believer in the consensus fidelium, that idea that the view of the faithful was crucial for the maintenance of Christian truth. His thinking on this is often misrepresented, however, as though the consensus fidelium is a crude matter of opinion polls. In his 1859 work, On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, he argued that it had been the collective mind of the faithful who had maintained the truth of the Nicene Creed during the fourth century when legions of bishops and priests had fallen into heresy. But this, he made clear, wasn’t a simple matter of Christians sticking to what they believed to be right:

‘For I argue that, unless they had been catechised, as St. Hilary says, in the orthodox faith from the time of their baptism, they never could have had that horror, which they show, of the heterodox Arian doctrine. Their voice, then, is the voice of tradition...’

In other words, for the consensus fidelium to be worth something, the faithful must have been catechised thoroughly, and this point is something that the Visitation hammers at.

The Visitors Speak...

If we work our way through the visitation summary we see, after all the stuff that obviously addresses the problem of clerical abuse and its mishandling, that a straightforward theme is apparent: that both clergy and laity need to up their respective games.

Look at the massive emphasis placed on the improvement of seminarians’ selection and formation, the urging of religious orders to focus on their scriptural and other sources, the hint at diocesan restructuring, and this:

‘It is vitally important that, at a point in history marked by rapid cultural and social transformation, all the components of the Church in Ireland hear in the first place a renewed call to communion: communion among the Bishops themselves and with the Successor of Peter; communion between diocesan Bishops and their clergy; communion between Pastors and lay persons; and communion between diocesan structures and communities of consecrated life - communion that is not attained merely through human agreements or strategies, but above all by listening humbly to God’s Word and to what the Holy Spirit gives and asks of the Church in our day. Only a united Church can be an effective witness to Christ in the world.

Among the pastoral priorities that have emerged most strongly is the need for deeper formation in the content of the faith for young people and adults; a broad and well-planned ongoing theological and spiritual formation for clergy, Religious and lay faithful; a new focus on the role of the laity, who are called to be engaged both within the Church and in bearing witness before society, in accordance with the social teachings of the Church. There is a need to harness the contribution of the new Ecclesial Movements, in order better to reach the younger generation and to give renewed enthusiasm to Christian life. A careful review is needed of the training given to teachers of religion, the Catholic identity of schools and their relationship with the parishes to which they belong, so as to ensure a sound and well-balanced education.

Since the Visitators also encountered a certain tendency, not dominant but nevertheless fairly widespread among priests, Religious and laity, to hold theological opinions at variance with the teachings of the Magisterium, this serious situation requires particular attention, directed principally towards improved theological formation. It must be stressed that dissent from the fundamental teachings of the Church is not the authentic path towards renewal.’

There’s a lot here, but look especially at that last paragraph, in light especially of the call to communion which the Visitation is intended to assist. That the there’s a widespread tendency in the Irish Church to hold theological opinions at variance with that of the Magisterium can hardly be disputed, especially in light of the results of the recent survey conducted by the Association of (800 or so) Catholic Priests.

It appears that the consensus fidelium in Ireland is out of step with the consensus fidelium of the global Church; it seems that we are slipping away from geographic and diachronic unity with the Church as a whole.

And it is that that brings us to the Passionist Father Brian D’Arcy, the Redemptorist Fathers Tony Flannery and Gerard Moloney, the Marist Father Seán Fagan and the Capuchin Father Owen O’Sullivan.

A Right to Leadership...

To listen to Fintan and others, with their hysterical talk of censorship and silencing, and with the unhelpful distinctions they draw between liberal and conservative clergy, it certainly looks as though there’s a massive clampdown going on in the Irish Church. This, of course, is hysterical nonsense.

Have any priests been laicised because of their views? Have any been excommunicated? Have any been denied their priestly faculties or in any other way suspended from ministry? Have any being denied whatever licenses they have to teach? Are any of them deprived of the incomes they’ve hitherto received through the work they do as priests?

Look at the case of Brian D’Arcy, about whom Fintan and Alison O’Connor and others are so exercised. In what way, exactly, is he censored? Put idle gossip aside, and ignore what journalists have written about this, just for a moment. Pay attention to his own words, as expressed to RTE’s Marian Finucane just the other day: It takes a lot of listening, as he does a lot of scene-setting and digresses a lot to charming effect, but at its core he describes how his ‘silencing’ has worked in practice over the last year.

‘I tried to work with it, in other words to do subjects that were non-contentious insofar as possible, and those subjects that were contentious, not to avoid them, but certainly if I was writing an article for the Sunday World that I would ask an appointed censor–’

 ‘Who appointed the censor?’

‘The Provincial – to read over them. The other man obviously didn’t want to do it, but he took it as his duty to do it. So if there had been articles that I thought needed that, they’d be passed to him, and he’d pass them back.’

‘Was any not passed?’

‘No, but I would have done that anyway, to be honest, you know? He was a good journalist. I would have done that if there was an area that – and I would still do it as a good journalist.’

Now, as a friend put it the other day, what this seems to consist of Father D’Arcy passing articles at his own discretion over to another priest, presumably within his own order and chosen by his superior, for the other priest to look over. This is something he says he would have done anyway, and is something that is normal practice among other orders. And, of course, not one of Father D’Arcy’s articles over the past fourteen months – on no matter how contentious the topic – has been blocked from publication, and despite his claim that he’s not supposed to talk about what’s happened, he’s evidently been talking about it to all and sundry over the last week or so.

If this is censorship, I can’t see what Orwell was so bothered about. Talk of Father D’Arcy being ‘gagged’ is clearly rot.

Granted, other priests seem to have had somewhat sterner fates, though again, none have been denied their priestly faculties, their incomes, or whatever licences they have to teach. Even Father Tony Flannery’s enforced six-week retreat is best understood as medicinal, for want of a better word: a chance for him to take a sustained period of time to reflect and pray and see if he could in conscience bring his heart and deeds into union with the mind of the Church.

Whatever else they may be – journalists or whatever – Father Flannery and Father D’Arcy and the rest are priests first and foremost. That defines them. As priests they have a privileged position, in that they’re given a pulpit from which to speak, but they have responsibilities to that position, one of which is that they much speak not merely from the heart but in accord with the Church. They don’t have days off from being priests; they’re always priests and are always called upon to represent Christ and his body the Church.

It’s not good enough to say that they subscribe to the Nicene Creed; plenty of Protestants subscribe to the Church’s historic creeds, but devout though they may be as Christians, they’re certainly not Catholics. There are, after all, Catholic and Protestant ways of understanding the ancient creeds, and there’s more to Catholicism than the Creed. The Creed never mentions the Eucharist, and it never mentions the Priesthood, to take two obvious examples.

The faithful are entitled to orthodox leadership, to priests who will teach in accord with what the Church teaches. That’s not to say that there’s not room for legitimate dissent on loads of things, but there are a fair few topics on which Rome has spoken and the case is indeed closed.

As Benedict said in a homily back in 1979:

‘To say that someone’s opinion doesn’t correspond to the doctrine of the Catholic church doesn’t mean violating their human rights. Everyone should have the right to freely express their own view, which the Catholic church decisively recognized at Vatican II and still does today. This doesn’t mean, however, that every opinion must be recognized as Catholic.’

That’s the key thing. Aquinas used to argue that hypocrisy was a worse sin than heresy, and while people are fully entitled to disagree with the teaching of the Church, if in conscience they cannot accept the teaching of the Church, then this has consequences. Certainly, if one disagrees with the Church on an important issue, then one can hardly stand as a priest, an ordained representative of the Church who acts in persona Christi, and teach something which the Church does not believe.

Irish Catholics are entitled to be led into their faith by people who hold to all the Catholic Church teaches. It’s as simple as that.

So is this why there’s a clampdown?

It’s far from clear that there is a clampdown going on. It seems that there were at least a handful of priests whose names were sent to the CDF for one reason or other a while back, but we need to be wary of assuming that just because all the stories are breaking at once, this means that there's a frenzy of anti-dissident action going on in Rome.

After all, the abuse stories started to break from the mid-1990s on, but they reflected abuse that had taken place in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

It's more than likely that there are those in Rome who are watching what's going on in Ireland with a very keen eye, largely due to the abuse crisis, which as the two Murphy Reports so ably demonstrate, was almost wholly concealed from Rome.

Rome has taken plenty of steps over the past twelve years or so to try to eradicate the problem of sexual abuse within the Church, but it's clear that this can't be enough: the best policies in the world don't mean anything if those charged with implementing them are lax about doing so, and so Rome has been forced to step in. It's been encouraged by the fact that the Irish Church has been in the main handling the abuse issue well over the last decade or so; although this is terribly, tragically, heartbreakingly late, it nonetheless is happening. 

However, it's evidently become clear that there are other problems in the Irish Church, problems that are in dire need of being seriously tackled, and an open climate of ‘undeclared heresy’, as Diarmuid Martin has put it, is central to this. So, having belatedly tacked the abuse issue, it makes sense that the Church start to tackle those priests who teach people that certain unCatholic things are fully compatible with the faith.

That said, Rome is hardly putting the boot in. A handful of priests have been – in practice – either cautioned or had their writings restricted in the most lenient of ways. Nobody’s been excommunicated, or expelled from the priesthood, or deprived of a livelihood or an income, or even suspended from ministry for a while.

And there's a serious school of thought that even this is to paint too hysterical a picture. It may simply be that Cardinal Levada, head of the CDF, is about to retire and move back to America, and has been clearing out his desk so his successor has a fresh start. I'm not just saying that because my editor says so, though he does; John Allen says so too, pointing out that this is normal practice for heads of Vatican offices as they approach retirement, and Cardinal Levada will turn 76 on June 15.