Facing Painful Truth Now Will Renew Church

Senator Rónán Mullen article for Irish Catholic – 25th March, 2010

 

Facing painful truths now will renew the Church

 

Fr Patrick McCafferty, who probably deserves to be nominated for one of the ‘People of the Year’ awards, told RTE last Monday of his sense of feeling ‘torn’ in these days. For he is a priest and passionate lover of his Church and his God, but he is also a survivor of sexual abuse by a priest – and therefore a man with hard things to say to the leadership of his Church for their failures over many years and their exposure of innocent children to suffering and abuse.

His description of Pope Benedict’s pastoral letter as coming from ‘a wise and kind voice’ differed from the response of many victims and media commentators over the weekend. But he acknowledged, and fairly, that more would need to be said about the Vatican and its response to child sexual abuse issues in the past. “Perhaps,” he said, “there needs to be some conversion of the bureaucracy. If I wrote to the Pope I’d be quite certain my letter wouldn’t get to him.”

Fr McCafferty’s words come as a strange comfort to many of us Catholics who have no direct experience of sexual abuse but who feel torn in our own way. As we witness the Church’s painfully slow progress through the ‘Slough of Despond’, we share the widespread anger and annoyance at each new disturbing revelation of past incompetence or maladministration (although if we are honest with ourselves, we wonder if we, too, would have stumbled back then). We know our Church is doing a lot to get child protection right in the present, but we need closure on the past. The Pope summed this up in a devastating phrase that may echo for decades in this country: this issue has “obscured the light of the Gospel to a degree that not even centuries of persecution succeeded in doing.” 

At the same time, we don’t know who to trust when we read our newspapers and listen to our radio and TV programmes. One religious affairs correspondent when challenged recently by a student friend of mine over ‘dreadful journalism’ in a piece about Pope Benedict, responded by saying ‘Perhaps he’s a dreadful man.’ That’s where some of the media are at.

RTE’s Joe Little last Friday, commenting on a possible siege mentality within the Vatican, conceded that “perhaps they’re quite correct to point out that there are elements in societies that want to undermine the Catholic Church and that they are using the child abuse scandals”.  Would he include some people in the media? Although some journalists have spoken unpalatable truths, some have been unable to resist pushing personal theories or group prejudices. Last weekend, journalist Fintan O’Toole claimed that the Church’s “system of authority” (meaning the all-male leadership), was “at the heart of the corruption." His boss at the Irish Times, Peter Murtagh, took it even further by adding that the Church has a deep-seated problem with human sexuality while the rest of the world has “moved on”. John Cooney of the Irish Independent wants a third Vatican Council in response to sexual abuse of children “whose reform agenda would rescind Pope Paul VI’s 1967 birth control ban”.

Such statements are calculated to advance an agenda that has little to do with child sexual abuse. They attempt to pathologise the Church while conveniently forgetting the incomprehension, shame, denial and duplicity that has characterised other peoples’ handling of this problem in Ireland and elsewhere.

A Christian response requires some hard work, I’m afraid. We have to master the issues and challenge the spin and condemn the over-simplification when possible. But we’ll have to take a lot on the chin as well. Not just because concern for victims requires that we avoid nit-picking. But because, however much we dislike those who manipulate the harsh facts through ignorance or ulterior motive, the truth is that they helped uncover those harsh facts when we were unwilling to face up to them ourselves.

Time and again, we are forced to learn that while we may believe the Catholic faith to be free of error, the Catholic leadership and Catholic persons definitely are not. In my own parish in Ballygall, there is a cross at which we are invited to pray for victims of child sexual abuse by clergy. It seems sad to think that it will always be there. But perhaps it is a gift from God – a permanent reminder of what we are capable of being, lest we ever be tempted to put our leaders, or even ourselves, on pedestals again.

One of the great moments of Pope John Paul’s papacy came during the Jubilee Year, when he apologised for the transgressions of the Church down through the ages. We may now be experiencing an even greater moment as we look hard and searchingly at our failings in the recent past. And even if some of the mistakes happened at the highest levels, we may be distressed but not paralysed. We don’t lose hope. We keep faith with the Church. It may be broken but it’s still the body of Christ.

ends