ABOUT THE CHURCH AND THE VATICAN

This was the leading article from The Catholic Herald, on November 4, 2009, when the Murphy Report had just been released. I did not see it then, but what it has to say is timeless and strikes all the right notes against hand-wringing and the feeling of despair that is bound to follow such devastating findings.


The Murphy report is a cry
for deep spiritual renewal



The Ryan report on Irish child abuse, published in May, left us holding our collective breath, waiting for the publication of the Murphy inquiry into child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

And it has proved again to be not so much another nail in the coffin as another nail in the Cross. The Body of Christ has been wounded, not by his enemies but by those who claimed to be his friends.

Our immediate task is to be on our knees: first, to pray for the victims; second, to pray for the priests who betrayed their vocations; third, to pray for those whose dereliction of duty put the reputation of the Church ahead of the command of love. And throughout we must remember that we “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

It is in that spirit alone that we may start to ask the questions. We must never minimise the damage which sexual abuse so often does to the young. Those who have suffered know this; those who work with them in later life know this too.

Yet it is common in many circumstances – including that of the close family. It is not typified as a clerical crime, nor indeed exclusive to any one sexual tendency. Like so many sexual sins, the temptations can be blindingly powerful, and what may seem to the perpetrator to be an almost trivial incident can have consequences which echo through a lifetime. Our only safeguard is to work continuously at the virtue of chastity, whether we are married or unmarried.

Though we may shrink with disgust from the sin, we recoil with a different emotion from the calculated cover-up, described by the report as “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the Church and the preservation of its assets”.

This was not spontaneous temptation but cold, institutionalised policy, carried out at senior levels – and implicitly encouraged by the neglect of the Holy See*. The reputation of the Church was preserved at the direct cost of Christ’s little ones. Here at least holy anger is justified. “My house is a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.”

And with holy anger may come hope. Is there a chance that the Church will be shocked into abandoning its cultural history of treating authority as a hierarchy of power and not as a hierarchy of loving service? Will we learn that we are a community bonded in our readiness to accept and love each other: “members of one another” – not just in words but in truth?

And since we are members of one another, should we not ask our bishops to declare a day of solemn reparation for the institutional and personal corruption with which we have wounded the Body of Christ?



*[This is assuming that the Holy See was aware at all times of what was taking place in Ireland. Is it not reasonable to assume that the secrecy clampdown by the local bishops extended, with more reason, to keeping the Vatican from knowing about the crimes and the cover-up?

No one appears to have sat down so far to determine exactly what the Vatican knew and when it knew about the Irish abuses. It was unlikely to have been before the scandals in the US broke through into the media.

As late as 2000, even Cardinal Ratzinger had dismissed the initial outcry over the US cases as mostly media-generated and not likely to be as widespread as reported.

Yet by 2005, his CDF has been assigned by John Paul II to receive complaints of priestly offenses, and he had begun the investigation of Father Maciel, which surely was part of why he denounced 'filth in the Church' at the Good Friday Via Crucis.

I am still awaiting a good and objective recounting of these scandals at the level of the local Churches and how and when they were reported to the Vatican - whether to the Congregation for the Clergy or the Congregation for Bishops or the CDF.

In Ireland, there was the egregious case earleir this year of Bishop John Magee of Cloyne, who was a private secretary to Paul VI, John Paul I [he was the first prelate to see the dead body of John Paul I), and John Paul II, for whom he also became the first Master of Liturgical Ceremonies until he was appointed to be Bishop of Cloyne in 1987.

However, as Bishop of Cloyne, he was later found by one of the earliest investigations into the Irish child abuse scandals to have failed to implement in his diocese self-regulatory procedures agreed by the bishops of Ireland in 1996. In particular, his diocese would not cooperate with a government investigation into two cases brought up in 2008. All this could make him criminally liable under Irish law for reckless endangerment of children.

Magee subsequently issued a statement acknowledging his failing but refused to resign. In March 2009, in response to a request by Magee, Pope Benedict XVI appointed an Apostolic Administrator to run the Diocese of Cloyne, while Magee, now 74, claimed he would devote his time to cooperating into inquiries about child abuse under his administration.

Magee's shortcomings were, of course, aggravated and magnified by the fact that he had held the positions he did at the Vatican