THE IRISH Catholic Church has a systemic inability to understand what the problem is, never mind look for a solution to the crisis over clerical child abuse, writer and broadcaster Fr Brian D’Arcy has said.Citing the Murphy report into abuse in the Dublin archdiocese, Fr D’Arcy said there was a “systemic failure in the way the clerical church works”.
“The faithful church” was facing “one scandal after another . . . and all because of the way we clerics have behaved, and the higher up the scale we went the worse we got”.
Genuine “faithful people” and those who suffered abuse in particular needed an apology, he said.
Fr D’Arcy said on BBC Radio Ulster yesterday that “faithful people” were the future for the church, and the clergy should ask them how to be of help in “their church”.
“You would also have to look at our theology of sexuality,” he continued. “I think it is warped at the moment.
“What we have to work on is a form of sexual morality and an acceptance of humanity, an acceptance of the great gift of sexuality which God gave us, and to say that the limits that we are putting on that are man-made rather than God-made.”
The requirement of celibacy being attached to the priesthood was “totally wrong”, he suggested. “In its own way it has been extraordinarily damaging to many good people. Some 110,000 priests have left the church to get married.
“One hundred thousand of those would have saved the church and would have brought that loveliness and broadmindedness.”
If a bishop had a child which had been abused or raped, he would have acted differently.
Celibacy was a contributory factor to the current crisis, he added.
Fr D’Arcy said the anticipated letter to the Irish church from the pope could suffer the same fate as the visit to Rome by the bishops last month.
“I wouldn’t look to Rome for the answer, I would look more to Rome for the situation of where the problem is.”
He predicted the pope would say nothing today about how the issue “was handled by men who should have known better. He will do nothing about the systemic failure, I suspect.”
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