The Roman Catholic Primate Archbishop Sean Brady said recently that “We live in remarkable times.”As an example of this he listed three of his current engagements — on a Wednesday he blessed the graves of the Irish rebels executed by the British in 1916; the following Sunday he spoke at the General Synod service in Armagh of the Church of Ireland Synod; and the next day he was due to preach at the Thanksgiving and Commemoration service at Trinity College Chapel in Dublin.
In doing so he was making history, and he was the first Cardinal to address a General Synod in an act of worship.
The equivalent for Presbyterians would be to invite Cardinal Brady to address them during the service on the Opening Night of the General Assembly.
Cardinal Brady might also reflect rather more sadly this week that we are still living in “remarkable times” — with the continuing scandals of the incompetent bankers, the greedy politicians and their dodgy expenses, and now the horrible revelations about child abuse in the Catholic Church in Ireland over a long period.
The Cardinal, as Primate of the Church in Ireland, has done his best to curb such practices since he came to office, and the worst of the horrors occurred some time ago. However, as Primate, he has to carry the can for all the sins of the ‘brothers and fathers’ whose prolonged abuse of vulnerable and innocent children was sickening in the extreme.
The headlines speak for themselves — “Evidence of beating and sex abuse ignored”; “Brutality and dire conditions in climate of fear”; “Physical, emotional and sexual abuse was widespread in State institutions”, in the Irish Republic.
The Cardinal has apologised profusely and has expressed his deep shame and profound sorrow that children suffered “in such awful ways.” My own blood runs cold when I think of little boys (and girls) of my age who came from poor families and were thrown into these institutions where they were systematically beaten, tortured and sexually abused by priests and nuns who were supposed to be caring for them in the name of Christ.
These monsters will face rigorous Divine judgement, either here or hereafter, and the apologies of the religious leaders are the easy bit — though I could not understand the odd remark of the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, who talked about clerics in Ireland having the “courage” to confront the past. Why do they need “courage” to be merely honest? Perhaps some Catholic leaders do live in a parallel universe.
However the State authorities in the Republic were also guilty of collusion with the abusers by ignoring the pleas and screams of children and pretending to the outside world that all was well.
This, however, is not just a Southern problem, and we in Northern Ireland have our abusing monsters too, like the odious Father Brendan Smyth.
The Protestant churches here have also had their individual victims and abusers, but nothing quite on the institutionalised scale of the Catholic-run institutions in the Republic.
The trouble about such abuse was its largely hidden nature. I have just returned from a holiday in the beautiful Renvyle peninsula of Connemara where, at the lovely village of Letterfrack, horrendous abuses took place.
Yet when I first went to Renvyle some 40 years ago, and several times afterwards, there was not even a whisper of such abuse.
Despite the many good priests and nuns in Ireland, the latest revelations will do enormous damage to the Catholic Church, which will take very many years to recover its moral authority to speak on this and also a wider range of issues.
It will also do great damage to Christianity in general, and its secular critics will have a field day.
The only light in the murk, has been the great courage of the victims who continued to speak out, and also the fact that children will now be better protected and listened to.
It has been a deeply shaming episode in the life of the Church and of the Irish nation.
May God forgive them, for most people will find it hard to do so.
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