Monday, February 22, 2010

Resignation of bishops will not solve anything

AMONGST men of the cloth, Bishop Martin Drennan has a reputation as a tenacious cleric.

A priest who worked with him in Dublin remembered him as a team player, determined and forthright.

Another likened him to a doughty Kilkenny hurler (he was born in Piltown) who will fight his case to the end.

Kilkenny hurlers usually win, and Bishop Drennan is already claiming victory in the battle for his resignation, even though the match isn't over yet.

He returned from the Irish bishops' two-day summit with the Pope last week to an interview in his Galway diocese, claiming to have the support of all of his fellow bishops, including his one-time nemesis Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.

He managed a polite dig at the Archbishop, suggesting that the Dublin prelate had no business calling him to account in the first place: "he has no direct responsibility for me."

Archbishop Martin has not responded, but the remarks are revealing of the sorry state of affairs within the Irish hierarchy at the moment.

In the aftermath of the publication of the Murphy report, which exposed the shameful cover up of child sexual abuse, disunity and unease lurk behind the episcopal robes of the Catholic hierarchy.

The case of Bishop Drennan has become a lightning rod for unprecedented levels of dissent.

The fault lines are drawn around how the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, has handled the Murphy report.

Has he favoured victims of clerical abuse over his own priests?

And to what degree should any bishops who were not directly involved in covering up cases of child abuse take responsibility for the culture of silence they bought into as senior figures in a church that swept the scandal under the carpet?

But there is more to the discord than Bishop Drennan's ecclesiastical future.

Across the country, bishops of every diocese have submitted statistics on clerical child sexual abuse to the Health Service Executive.

The audit report will be given to the Government next month and is likely to be published.

Whether the fall-out will lead to a full judicial inquiry into how the Catholic Church handled child sex abuse remains to be seen.

What happens to Bishop Drennan could set the bar for the rest of them.

The game has been played out since the Murphy report was published in November.

It took a while, but by the end of January, four of the five serving Bishops named in the report reluctantly offered their resignations.

Bishop Donal Murray, whose resignation is the only one to be accepted by the Pope; Bishop Jim Moriarty; Bishop Eamon Walsh; and Bishop Raymond Field, whose resignations have yet to be accepted.

Bishop Drennan is the last man standing.

He claims his is not a resigning case.

He was mentioned only once in the Murphy report and, even then, in a positive way.

He has argued that there was no such thing as collective responsibility for auxiliary bishops, because Cardinal Desmond Connell, the then-Archbishop, made all the decisions.

Calls for his resignation from victims of clerical abuse persist.

Andrew Madden articulated the reasons why he must go last week: "To date, he has not publicly identified a single action and said, 'that is what I did in response to challenge that culture of secrecy and cover-up that existed in Dublin when I arrived'. That is turning a blind eye. That is why he should resign."

Divisions in the Catholic hierarchy emerged soon after the inevitable calls for resignations of serving bishops.

In a move that some considered unforgivable, Archbishop Martin prodded them along, publicly urging the bishops named in the report to account for their actions or inactions.

Bishops Walsh and Field made no secret of their anger, insisting they had done nothing wrong. Bishop Drennan publicly accused Archbishop Martin of calling his integrity into question.

Bishop Dermot O'Mahony, one of the most heavily criticised bishops in the Murphy report, wrote seething letters, unleashing a torrent of anger against Archbishop Martin, which found their way to the Irish Catholic last week.

In one, Bishop O'Mahony lashed out: "You were out of the diocese for 31 years and had no idea how traumatic it was for those of us who had to deal with allegations without protocols . . . in the matter of child sex abuse."

Since then, a smattering of priests spoke out following Bishop O'Mahony's call to ecclesiastical arms.

Fr Tony Flannery, a Redemptorist priest in Galway, accused Archbishop Martin of showing his bishops scant respect by using the media to communicate with them.

In the Catholic magazine The Furrow, Fr Padraig McCarthy, a retired Dublin priest, questioned the Murphy report's findings, in particular how it came to the conclusion that the vast majority of priests turned a blind eye to child abuse.

He accused the Archbishop of letting down his priests and called on them to question the claims of a "cover up".

For his part, Archbishop Martin accused Bishop O'Mahony of showing neither remorse nor apology for mishandling complaints.

According to one bishop, the evident anger of prelates is understandable from a human point of view: "The content and the whole nature of the Murphy report has been shattering for everybody, most of all for the victims of abuse, but also obviously for those who have mismanaged the abuse," said the bishop who did not want to be named.

"And we all admit it has been spectacularly mismanaged. That is the starting point. Obviously the people caught up in that and those named in any way, even remotely, feel very intensely and feel sore about the way that they have effectively been -- some would say -- hung out to dry or scape-goated -- that's how they feel about it."

But the anger of victims of clerical abuse must take precedence, according to Fr Martin Cosgrave, a long standing priest of the archdiocese and a supporter of Archbishop Martin's: "It cannot be the case that anyone other than the survivors should be the top of the agenda," he said although he is aware that others disagree.

"The people who are perceived as not agreeing with how Archbishop Martin has gone about things, I think they are coming from a slightly different slant. They see that, apart from survivors, that other people have rights on the issue as well . . . I think there are people in our business who have been falsely accused over the years. There are those who feel that there might have been a better way of drawing responsibility out of people rather than drawing it out across the Prime Time programme. That seems to me where people are coming from."

But, according to another ecclesiastic observer, some bishops and priests are having difficulty swallowing the notion of mass responsibility for the sins of clerical abusers.

"I think the institutional church in Ireland has to accept collective responsibility either in individual dioceses or in the overall church for what happened. I don't think there is any good in saying 'I didn't know anything about it'," said Fr Kevin Hegarty, a parish priest in Mayo who lost his job on a Catholic magazine for writing articles on sex abuse.

"I know that whenever I sought to question any of this there was a culture of silence about it at the time . . .

"Some people knew what was happening, but overall there was a sense of collective silence, which isn't a good thing at all."

He blames a "club of clericalism" for the refusal in some areas to truly absorb the culpability of the Church in protecting child abusers.

"I think that there is a culture of clericalism among priests which means that there is a great sense of undue deference and loyalty to the club of priests. While I haven't heard priests in general criticise the Murphy report in those terms, neither have I heard many priests praise the Murphy report."

The two-day summit with Pope Benedict last week was at least in part about getting the Irish hierarchy to sing from the same hymn sheet in its response to the child abuse scandal.

Instead, Archbishop Martin returned with his "wings clipped by Rome", which explained why other bishops were so happy, as suggested by Andrew Madden, during the Archbishop's meeting with abuse victims on Friday.

Archbishop Martin denied that was the case but later acknowledged that there were divisions.

It didn't help that the summit was regarded as a PR disaster.

The spectacle of grown men obsequiously kissing the Papal ring before entering an all-male enclave to discuss the rape of children by their priests appeared out of kilter with our times.

Victims of clerical abusers were angry that the Pope failed to apologise for the abuse and that the question of resignations was not addressed.

For his part, Bishop Drennan has claimed that his resignation would do nothing to help the healing process.

But to the victims of child abuse, his refusal to bow to their demands is rubbing salt in a raw wound.

Whether Bishop Drennan stays or goes will not solve the church's problems, according to Fr Kevin Hegarty.

As long as celibacy is forced on priests and women are excluded, the dysfunction that bred the monstrosities that led to the Murphy report will continue.

"There was and is dysfunction with the church.

"Unless that is addressed we can't begin to emerge into a more healthy kind of church," he said.
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