On the one hand, for those who still feel an affection and loyalty to the church, there’s the “few bad apples” approach, which posits that the problems stem from the fact that the church was and is ultimately well-intentioned, but too lax about who it allowed into the Priesthood in the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s.
This school might further argue that corruption was allowed to take hold in some seminaries, resulting in sexual predators being permitted to take advantage of the church’s access and duty of care to vulnerable men, women, and children.
The second school of thought, and likely the more dominant one, is that the church itself was institutionally corrupt, and that the reason these offenders were granted safe harbour in its ranks was that the Church feared the loss of its power and prestige more than it cared about protecting victims. It’s one thing, after all, to uncover the fact that a priest is a paedophile. It’s quite another to move him to another parish and say nothing more about it.
The newest revelations about Bishop Eamon Casey – a bad apple if ever there was one – would tend to give the second school of thought a bit of a boost, if it ever needed such a thing.
The allegations made in last night’s RTE documentary do not tell us much that we did not already know or suspect about Bishop Casey himself – that he was an abusive power-mad hypocrite when it came to sex was probably already baked into his public image.
The accusations that he sexually abused his own niece when she was a child add another level of horror, to be sure, but I suspect Casey was already seen by most of the public as an example of the very worst of the Princlings of the Church. This is just a case of throwing another log on an already raging fire, where his reputation is concerned. Besides, he’s dead.
No, the bigger problem is that these accusations are coming to light now, while convincing evidence was presented that the Catholic Church has known of them for years.
The biggest problem for the Church – and arguably the reason that trust in it has never really recovered, and likely never will – is that it has never, truly, had a full reckoning with what went on.
There’s never been a moment to “draw a line” under the scandals, because if journalists look hard enough, there is almost always another shoe to drop. For example:
The documentary reveals that Casey disobeyed Vatican sanctions and continued to practise as a priest. He was reprimanded for this by the then bishop of Galway Martin Drennan.
That restriction continued for the last 10 years of his life but was never publicly disclosed in Casey’s lifetime.
This is a fairly simple and straightforward example of the problem: If Eamon Casey was banned from ministering as a priest, but was openly doing so anyway, then the fault lies with the church for not publicly calling him out. There is – just about – a case to be made that the Church could not disclose unproven allegations of child sex abuse against him, but there is no reason whatever why, given the nature of those accusations and the established record of Casey’s breaching his vows of chastity, that he should not have been publicly defrocked and sacked and an announcement made that he was no longer a Priest, and no longer authorised to minister.
Indeed, the other issue is that those vows of chastity don’t seem to have been taken seriously by the church at all. Whether one believes in God or not is immaterial here: Priests are supposed to.
The vows they take are solemn vows, made before what the church believes to be the supreme almighty of the universe. If there’s any promise made anywhere that should be held to be unbreakable, then that’s surely it. Yet the church is riddled with Priests who have broken those vows – many of them consensually and within the bounds of civil law – and been allowed to continue in office anyway. How is anybody supposed to take the church’s moral leadership seriously when people in the church can break oaths made to God?
The public’s loathing of hypocrisy is not, of course, confined to priests – just ask any of the many celebrities who like to fly around the world in private jets to discuss climate change, or politicians who preach austerity while living in comfort themselves. But the public is particularly sensitive to hypocrisy when it comes to those who purport to offer moral and spiritual leadership, especially when those morals involve things like chastity and self-restraint.
The church knows this – and that’s the problem. Fear of a full accounting of all the failures of those in charge has led the Church, even today, to a disposition where it still will not come fully clean about all of the information in its possession about people like Casey, which ultimately hands the role of reporting it over to the Church’s enemies, like RTE. When you consider that these scandals began more than thirty years ago, in Ireland, it is absolutely astonishing that those who run the Church are still allowing further shoes to drop.
The result of all of this is a public anger at clerics which only barely remains beneath the surface. My own experience of this – the 2018 abortion referendum – was that for many people that referendum was not a vote on abortion at all, but a proxy referendum on the Catholic Church and its role in Irish society. This is of course deeply unfair on the very many good priests and religious who still – even in 2024 – do vital and valuable work in their communities, particularly in times of tragedy. But it’s also the inevitable reaction of a generation – many now in their 50s and 60s – who were told to feel shame about their relatively normal sexual urges only to find that many of those shaming them were living like Caligula.
Even now, decades on, the Church refuses to learn that lesson, even as religious vocations become rarer than hens’ teeth (nuns are now almost extinct in Ireland) and church attendances dwindle by the year. If the Pope – this one or his predecessors – had any interest in saving the church in Ireland, he should have sacked every Irish Bishop twenty years ago and installed people from outside the country to completely reform the Irish Church, root and branch.
He didn’t, and so we still have further revelations, even in 2024. The institution deserves everything it gets.