DYSFUNCTIONAL.
Disconnected.
Elitist.
Narcissistic.
The leadership of
the Roman Catholic Church downplayed the torture and rape of children
or ''managed'' it to uphold the primacy of the institution, its power,
standing and reputation.
This damning indictment of the culture at the heart of
the Vatican came not from a communist demagogue or a firebrand ayatollah
but from Enda Kenny, the Prime Minister of Ireland, one of the most
Catholic countries in the world.
The government has also warned the church it can no
longer even consider the seal of the confessional to be sacrosanct,
promising to impose a five-year jail sentence for anyone found guilty of
not passing information on child sexual abuse to state authorities.
In apparent retaliation, the Holy See has withdrawn its
ambassador from Ireland, claiming there had been an "excessive" reaction
by the Irish government to what is known as the Cloyne report, the
latest and most incendiary account of clerical sexual abuse and church
cover-up.
Kenny's confrontational address to the Irish parliament
last month reflected the collective mood and tapped the raw pain and
sense of betrayal felt by people across Ireland after the publication of
Cloyne the previous week.
The state-funded independent report detailed
numerous allegations of abuse by priests and a failure to report them in
the rural diocese of Cloyne from 1996 to 2009.
Pointedly, the local
Catholic bishops didn't rate a mention in Kenny's 12-minute speech: the
Prime Minister saved his ire for their bosses in Rome.
Two other major reports published since 2005 also
breached the doughty walls of church silence, but Cloyne is different
because it found systematic sexual abuse of children was still a reality
as recently as 2008 and the church had been paying lip service to its
own 1996 guidelines on child protection, which include the mandatory
reporting of suspected abuse to state authorities.
Further, it said the Vatican had effectively encouraged
bishops to ignore these guidelines by dismissing them as "merely a
discussion document".
In his landmark speech, Kenny said the revelations of the
Cloyne report had brought the government, Irish Catholics and the
Vatican to an unprecedented juncture.
"It's fair to say that after the
Ryan and Murphy reports, Ireland is, perhaps, unshockable when it comes
to the abuse of children,'' he said.
''But Cloyne has proved to be of a different order.
Because for the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse
exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry in a
sovereign democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three
decades ago.
"And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the
dysfunction, disconnection, elitism … the narcissism that dominate the
culture of the Vatican to this day.''
Had Kenny delivered this speech at the beginning of his
lengthy political career in the mid-1970s, it would have been considered
a suicide note, but in the Ireland of 2011 he was preaching to the
converted.
Most people in Ireland still profess faith in God but
church doctrine no longer governs personal spirituality.
Indeed, there
are now calls to remove the church from every aspect of public life.
Some Catholic parents are even doing the unthinkable and choosing not to
baptise their children.
Most people in Ireland still regard themselves as
Catholic but with a small ''c''. Contrary to stereotypes, this is no
priest-ridden, theocratic backwater: the church may still supervise the
education system and control many hospitals, but for the most part this
is a cosmopolitan, urbanised, secular society.
University student Siobhan Ferriter, 19, typifies a
worldly, well-educated, affluent generation for whom the church is
considered largely irrelevant, if it is considered at all. A product of
the still largely Catholic education system, she says religious teaching
was incidental rather than intrinsic to her upbringing.
"I went to a Catholic school in Dublin but I blocked a
lot of it out, I suppose. I don't consider myself a lapsed Catholic
because I don't remember believing a word of it in the first place," she
says.
"None of my friends go to Mass either … I certainly wouldn't get
married in a church; that would be hypocritical."
Unlike Ferriter, Paul Dunbar, 32, has decided not only to
ignore the church but to leave it entirely. Dunbar is a founder of
countmeout.ie, a website informing people how they can make a formal
exit, an act that is surprisingly difficult and which accounts in part
for the misleadingly high numbers of people ostensibly listed as
Catholics.
"I had been lapsed for a few years, but when the reports
on abuse came out I wanted to go a step further by repudiating any
involvement with a church responsible for such scandals - being passive
was no longer good enough for me," he says.
"The church leadership has
clearly lost the plot."
Although most people will not go as far as Dunbar, in
practising terms many are effectively non-Catholic.
Recently, Archbishop
Diarmuid Martin, the liberal-leaning church leader of the nation's most
populous area, estimated only 18 per cent of Catholics in the Dublin
archdiocese attended Mass on a weekly basis, stating that in some parts
of Dublin the number was closer to 5 per cent.
Compare this to the 1.2
million Catholics who attended the papal Mass in Dublin's Phoenix Park
in 1979.
Increasingly, people confine their church attendance to
life's set-piece events - christenings, weddings and funerals.
Indeed,
churches are more like mausoleums to past glories.
These days pews are
mostly empty or dotted with a few pensioners.
The drift away from
Catholicism has been gathering pace for some time, but revelations of
the devious deceit and persistent cover-up of child abuse detailed since
2005 in the Ryan, Murphy and Cloyne reports have transformed passive
indifference into white-hot rage.
"There is no doubt at all there is far more hostility
since Cloyne and the previous reports," says Tony Flannery, 64, a
priest based in rural Athenry, County Galway.
"There is new anti-church
feeling combined with a lot of suppressed anger going back generations
and these reports have brought that into the open. I have not been
verbally abused but I know plenty of priests who have."
And it isn't just the reports detailing child abuse. In
many ways the Catholic Church in Ireland is being devastated by a
tsunami of its own making. Its abuse of power also extended to its role
in the so-called industrial schools and Magdalene laundries, places of
institutionalised slavery where children and young women were routinely
physically, sexually and emotionally assaulted.
The Magdalene laundries, which operated before the
formation of the state in 1922 until 1996, were effectively church
businesses where women and girls were imprisoned and forced to work in
appalling conditions for little or no pay.
Many of them suffered a
lifetime of physical and psychological abuse at the hands of the nuns in
charge. In many cases their ''crime'' was to be a single mother. Only
now are their stories being widely circulated and their campaign for
redress gathering pace.
Similarly, thousands of boys and adolescents were put
into care in the industrial schools over decades, many for missing
school or simply because they came from large families where their
parents were not able to take care of them.
The media has highlighted
decades of wanton abuse in these institutions, creating a furore in the
process.
So far, 18 religious orders have agreed to pay €600
million ($A783 million) in compensation to industrial school victims.
The state has agreed to pay €1.3 billion for effectively allowing the
church to run riot with its most vulnerable citizens.
Aside from the tear-inducing accounts by survivors of
abuse, what is further fuelling public and political anger is the
refusal of many in power within the church to take responsibility for
their actions. Cloyne appears to have shown past apologies are empty
rhetoric.
In 2009, for example, only five days before the
publication of the Ryan report, which found abuse was "endemic" in
schools and orphanages run by Catholic orders in Dublin, the Christian
Brothers said it "totally rejects any allegations of systemic abuse … or
that boys were inadequately fed or clothed … and vehemently repudiates
all unsubstantiated allegations of sexual abuse".
Church power may have waned but many older people only now feel able to express their disdain of it.
Riona de Faoite, 60, grew up in rural County Kerry at a time when ''priests were gods and everything they said was law''.
"Religion was rammed down our throat both at home and at
school," she says. "We went to Mass every Sunday, confession every week,
said the rosary at home and my parents literally stood over us to make
sure we said our prayers."
Perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the church's
power during de Faoite's formative years would have been on popular
culture, where books and movies were banned if they contravened church
teaching, particularly on sexuality.
Over the years the banned list ranged from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in 1932 for alleged references to sexual promiscuity to Monty Python's Life of Brian in 1979 for blasphemy.
Certainly, non-conformists paid a heavy price. One of
Ireland's best-loved authors, John McGahern, famously lost his job as a
schoolteacher during the 1960s following the attempted publication of a
novel that fell foul of the omnipotent archbishop of Dublin at the time,
John Charles McQuaid, whose concerns appeared to be as much temporal as
spiritual.
Like many other Irish writers, McGahern was forced to
emigrate to find work. Among other things the book dealt with were a
priest's inappropriate sexual behaviour towards an adolescent male
cousin and sexual abuse by a father on his son.
Reflecting on the experience years later, McGahern, who
returned to Ireland and died in 2006, said somewhat presciently:
"Authority's writ ran from God the father down and could not be
questioned. One of the compounds at its base was sexual sickness and
frustration, as sex was seen, officially, as unclean and sinful,
allowable only when it too was licensed."
At the heart of these sexual abuse scandals is a Vatican
afraid to confront the unhealthy attitudes engendered by celibacy, says
Father Flannery, who helped form the Association of Catholic Priests in
October 2010, a grassroots organisation of clergy across Ireland that
has quickly gained a reputation as a thorn in the side of the church
authorities.
"Celibacy is the issue Rome is trying desperately to keep
out of the debate," he says. "The terribly negative teaching on
sexuality is a significant component [in sexual abuse cases] but it
doesn't want to address the effect it is having."
Flannery is particularly scathing of the policies pursued
by Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessor, John Paul II, which he says
have concentrated power in the hands of an elite with an appetite for
turning back the clock.
When the globe-trotting John Paul visited Ireland in
1979, an estimated two-thirds of what was then the youngest population
in Europe turned out to greet him.
The fervour was palpable, with yellow
and white papal flags festooning every city street and country village.
His trip is regarded as the high point for the Catholic
Church in Ireland, but the dizzy decline in church attendance and
vocations since shows it was as much theatrical as spiritual.
There is speculation Pope Benedict might pay a visit to
Ireland next summer after it hosts the 50th Eucharistic Congress - a
church set-piece last held in Ireland in 1932.
If this does happen, such
is the mood in Ireland that there may be as many angry protesters as
fervent believers turning out to greet him.
Further Cloyne-like reports are expected, and there is
growing resentment at the hundreds of millions of euros a cash-strapped
state is paying to uncover abuses perpetrated by the church.
Regardless of the Vatican's response to Cloyne, which is
expected by the end of his month, the Vatican knows a mea culpa will not
be nearly enough to regain its past influence in Ireland.
Given what
has happened, few people here have any appetite for a trip down memory
lane.
Douglas Dalby is a Dublin-based journalist.