RITE & REASON: The approach of leading churchmen to clerical sex abuse issue is reprehensible.
THE
BISHOP of Down and Connor, Noel Treanor, has told us in Belfast that
his fellow prelates acknowledged at their Rome meetings in February last
year “cover-ups and mismanagement” in their treatment of clerical
sexual abuse. He urged the church to repent of its sins and seek
forgiveness.
He is to be commended for this and, like Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin, for locating his plea for forgiveness squarely in the
context of a call to repentance.
Genuine penitence requires not
only the implementation of adequate child-protection measures (the
absence of which gave rise to neither paedophilia in the church nor the
relevant concealments), financial compensation to victims, and symbolic
washing of feet.
It also requires a clear admission of unpalatable
facts about the familial nature of the predominantly clerical
sub-culture from which these cover-ups emanated and the manner in which
Pope Benedict continues to respond to the issue.
These truths
include that the church, contrary to what was said by most of its
episcopal spokesmen (before and after, but not during, the Rome meetings
of February 2010), did indeed cover up sexual abuse by some of its
members, the most notorious of whom included Fr Brendan Smyth and Fr
Tony Walsh.
Second, that “the church” was primarily the spiritual
family comprising not merely bishops and heads of religious orders, but
also priests, nuns and brothers of divergent juristic status, subject,
in their professional capacity, to the precepts of canon law.
The all-important issue is whether it is prepared to make amends for its wrongdoing.
Cardinal
Seán Brady, Bishop Francis McKiernan, the Norbertine community at
Kilnacrott, two Premonstratensian abbots-general, senior Vatican
officials, including a papal nuncio, and other religious persons
withheld from relevant civil authorities for decades information that
might have enabled Smyth’s incarceration and so prevent many crimes he
committed against children and minors over almost 50 years.
Cardinal Brady swore on oath in 1975 that he would never disclose to anyone what he knew of Smyth’s crimes.
So too, in similar circumstances, did other canon lawyers, some of whom were subsequently elevated to the Irish episcopal bench.
The
Murphy report reveals not only the fact that Archbishop Desmond Connell
covered up many of Fr Walsh’s crimes but also that priests of the
Dublin archdiocese who were acquainted with particular instances of the
latter’s misconduct, chose (as did fellow clergy in like situations
throughout the Catholic world) to restrict what they knew to
ecclesiastical confines.
The religious family (familia), governed
by the authority (auctoritas) of its head (paterfamilias), was the
matrix from which many concealments emerged, but what of repentance?
There are, on this score, four obvious grounds for disquiet.
First,
the church has refused to acknowledge that it covered up clerical
sexual abuse. Its apologists have, almost without exception, either
remained silent or insisted that its response to the problem was merely
“inadequate”.
It has failed to explore, in a serious way, the
causes of these concealments or, in particular, to ask why cover-ups
were executed, sometimes in good faith, by people of exceptional
intelligence and goodness.
Third, the church continues to deny the
very existence of recalcitrant family members who, though not
physically maltreated, were, nonetheless, victims of its “mismanagement”
of clerical sexual abuse.
(Fr Bruno Mulvihill, the Norbertine
“whistleblower”, was reduced to virtual penury by his order for
disclosing the extent of the church’s cover-up of Smyth’s crimes.)
Fourth,
its supreme pontiff, Pope Benedict, has shown great insensitivity
towards the feelings of injured parties by not only refusing the
proffered resignations of Bishops Ray Field and Eamonn Walsh but also by
promoting the beatification of Pope John Paul II, whose treatment of
the abuse issue was reprehensible.
Catholics should, of course,
forgive and forget – but it would be delinquent to do so while the
clerical sexual abuse issue is treated in ways that are superficial,
offensive to victims and unworthy of exculpation.
Dr Joseph McBride is a retired senior lecturer in philosophy at NUI, Maynooth