‘The bishop [of Clonfert] apologised to victims and their families
“for my own previous lack of understanding of the sinister and
recidivist nature of the child abuser, and the lifelong damage that this
destructive behaviour has on victims”.’
This is from the Irish Times account of the NBSCCC report on
child protection practises in the diocese of Clonfert (6th Sep, 2012),
and of Bishop John Kirby’s response.
Yet as early as 309 AD the Catholic Council of Elvira recorded the phenomenon of clergy abuse of minors.
So, for at least seventeen centuries our church was supposedly
totally unaware of paedophile recidivism and of the fact that clergy
sexual abuse of children causes the deepest psychological (and therefore
also spiritual) injuries – including severe mental illness and suicide.
As far as I am aware, there has not even yet been any investigation
sponsored by the Catholic magisterium of this monumental failure of
Catholic care, understanding and wisdom.
Why did we have to wait for
Enlightenment secularisation of the study and care of psychological
illness to reveal the full spiritual effects of clerical sexual abuse of
children?
That the magisterium will still not initiate any attempt to
answer this question is another appalling scandal.
On its own it
prevents any thoughtful Catholic from having the slightest confidence in
the present church leadership.
The most obvious likely reason for seventeen centuries of blindness
on this issue is clergy-inspired shame over the phenomenon of sexuality,
and in particular the clerical institution’s need to preserve the
illusion of clerical asexuality ever since the adoption of the celibacy
obligation.
Mandatory clerical celibacy is not in itself ‘the’ cause of clerical
sexual abuse – but everything we have learnt so far points to toxic
clerical shame over clerical sexuality as the decisive factor in the
still dysfunctional response of Catholic leadership to that phenomenon.
And every day that goes by without a magisterial initiative to
discover the roots of the greatest scandal in Catholic history makes
that conclusion more inescapable.