This is from the Irish Times account of the NBSCCC report on child protection practises in the diocese of Clonfert (6th Sep, 2012), and of Bishop John Kirby’s response.
Yet as early as 309 AD the Catholic Council of Elvira recorded the phenomenon of clergy abuse of minors.
So, for at least seventeen centuries our church was supposedly totally unaware of paedophile recidivism and of the fact that clergy sexual abuse of children causes the deepest psychological (and therefore also spiritual) injuries – including severe mental illness and suicide.
As far as I am aware, there has not even yet been any investigation sponsored by the Catholic magisterium of this monumental failure of Catholic care, understanding and wisdom.
Why did we have to wait for Enlightenment secularisation of the study and care of psychological illness to reveal the full spiritual effects of clerical sexual abuse of children?
That the magisterium will still not initiate any attempt to answer this question is another appalling scandal.
On its own it prevents any thoughtful Catholic from having the slightest confidence in the present church leadership.
The most obvious likely reason for seventeen centuries of blindness on this issue is clergy-inspired shame over the phenomenon of sexuality, and in particular the clerical institution’s need to preserve the illusion of clerical asexuality ever since the adoption of the celibacy obligation.
Mandatory clerical celibacy is not in itself ‘the’ cause of clerical sexual abuse – but everything we have learnt so far points to toxic clerical shame over clerical sexuality as the decisive factor in the still dysfunctional response of Catholic leadership to that phenomenon.
And every day that goes by without a magisterial initiative to discover the roots of the greatest scandal in Catholic history makes that conclusion more inescapable.