State too cozy with church

As a bleak winter of discontent and ignominy descends upon the Irish Catholic Church, it faces the painful prospect of having to comply with a State-sponsored inquiry into clerical sex abuse.

Such a statute-based inquiry now appears inevitable, though there could yet be considerable difficulty over its terms of reference. The Minister for Justice, Michael McDowell, has already cautioned that proper reflection is required before the next stage.

Hidden obstacles await. Will there be Vatican intervention, an attempt to pull the strings behind the scenes? What role will Canon Law play? Will the powers-that-be within the Church mount a constitutional challenge? The guarantee enshrined in Article 44.5 - “Every religious denomination shall have the right to manage its own affairs” - could yet be the heat shield behind which the Church tries to hide, if it opts for a policy of non-compliance.

To do so would be foolhardy in the extreme. The reality, though, is that the shots will not be called in Drumcondra or Armagh, but in faraway Rome. Just check with the American bishops.

That said, we have by any standards reached an extraordinary juncture in the history of Church-State relations in Ireland. It is a fair bet the founding fathers of our Republic, who so zealously courted the Church in the immediate post-independence phase, never envisaged a situation where the State is now on the threshold of seeking to put the Church in the dock.

And while the focus rightly is on the appalling catalogue of paedophile abuses of minors by clerics (and the effect of this on victims and their families), the real fear in the higher echelons of the Church is that the implications of any State inquiry will shake the Church to its very foundations.

The reason for this is not difficult to discern. For lurking behind the awful instances of clerical paedophilia are questions about the exercise of power and authority, and the further abuses inherent in that exercise to the extent that its primary purpose was one of official denial and cover-up.

The State now finds itself in the position akin to that of Hercules, whose task it was to cleanse the Augean stables. The stench of sexual deviation and corruption from the stables of the Church reeks fiercely just now, yet even fouler smells may circulate before the Herculean task is completed.

The Church’s future credibility depends on whether and how it cooperates in this cleansing exercise. For right now, as Fr Colm Kilcoyne so starkly put it yesterday on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland, the Church is facing “institutional meltdown”. Only a thorough form of moral and spiritual cleansing and renewal can avoid this.

On the inquiry front, the great impediment now to be overcome is the legacy of the cosy relationship between Church and State. It was one of the main characteristics of the Free State and then the Republic.

The State’s adoption of a subservient attitude to the Church enabled the kind of clericalism that is now being so roundly condemned. For far too long the Catholic Church has enjoyed and exploited its privileged status in Irish society. This manifested itself in a form of episcopal and clerical arrogance, to which over many years our political leaders reacted in supine fashion.

It also led to inverted values, where the gospel imperatives were regularly relegated to secondary status in the interest of the maintenance of Church privilege and power. The 1937 Constitution gave formal recognition to this by recognising the “special position” of the Catholic Church.

When a move was made in 1972 to remove the “special position” from the Constitution, the-then head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal William Conway, declared that he would “not shed a tear” if the change went ahead.

Little wonder that Cardinal Conway didn't feel the need to shed tears: he knew full well the Church's privileged status was well and truly cemented in place at that stage. It didn't need to be propped up by a formula of words in the Constitution. The Cardinal also knew better than most that the deleted clause was an “empty formula”, as Eamon de Valera famously said of another form of words.

But there was nothing empty or saccharine about the reality of the Church’s position.

Now that position is under the forensic spotlight.

And with unknown and unknowable consequences.