Last autumn, as Pope Benedict XVI celebrated an
outdoor mass in Hyde Park, I joined a march through London to protest
against his visit to the UK.
It was boisterous and good-natured, but I
was struck by the presence of a number of elderly women who seemed to be
marching on their own.
When we started up conversations, I discovered why they had come; speaking
quietly, and often with Irish accents, they revealed that as children or
young adults they had been victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.
The exposure of clerical abuse in the worldwide Catholic church has been going
on for decades.
Last week, another official report was published, exposing
the church's failure to tell the authorities about allegations of sexual
abuse in the Irish diocese of Cloyne, but the result was unexpected.
Suddenly and without precedent, the Irish prime minister attacked the
Vatican in terms that raised the prospect of his country one day becoming a
secular republic.
Speaking in the Irish parliament, Enda Kenny talked about "the
rape and torture of children" and said the report exposed in Ireland "an
attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a sovereign, democratic
republic".
This is jaw-dropping stuff: Ireland is one of the most Catholic countries in
the world.
The Irish church has long behaved as though it's immune from the
criminal law, and that has exposed thousands of vulnerable people – not only
children but the young women who were used as slave labour in church-run
Magdalene laundries – to horrific abuse.
The Cloyne report describes the
Vatican as "entirely unhelpful" and says it effectively gave Irish
bishops the freedom to ignore the church's own guidelines on reporting
abuse.
Abusers continued to officiate as priests and were held in high
regard by victims' families; in one case, the abuser officiated at a
victim's wedding.
It isn't only in Ireland that such accusations have been levelled at the
church.
A Catholic priest was arrested this month in Germany, where he's
accused of sexually abusing three boys as recently as 2007, while the church
in Australia is paying millions of pounds in compensation after failing to
stop paedophile priests for decades.
The Vatican has repeatedly failed to
protect children, involving itself in a series of shameful cover-ups which
have allowed paedophile priests to escape the law.
Last year's huge PR exercise during the Pope's visit to the UK was a reminder
that two irreconcilable views of the pontiff exist side by side: the pious,
white-haired, avuncular theologian versus the leader of an institution that
continues to shield child-abusers and rapists.
No wonder the events of the
last few days have the appearance of a seismic shift, with Kenny echoing the
Vatican's sternest secular critics as he talked about "the dysfunction,
disconnection, elitism – the narcissism – that dominate the culture of the
Vatican to this day".
Ireland's political class has been left reeling after Kenny issued a direct
challenge to the pontiff, warning him that "the standards of conduct
which the church deems appropriate to itself cannot, and will not, be
applied to the workings of democracy and civil society in this republic".
Even in Catholic Ireland, it seems, the Vatican's behaviour has reached a
tipping point.
Let's hope that the result is a long-overdue debate about
separation between Church and State.