Church in crisis - A legacy in great need of rejuvenation

TODAY, as we celebrate St Patrick the man — or men — who brought Christianity to these islands, his Catholic successors preside over a discredited and imploding church.

By their delusion, arrogance, deceit and collusion they show time and time again that they regard canon law as the primary arbiter of right or wrong. They may bring the centuries-long commitment of so many generations of Irish people to Catholicism to an end. They may achieve what persecution and repression failed to.

This week’s revelations about Cardinal Seán Brady — that he was involved in a process to gather information about the notorious Norbertine paedophile Brendan Smyth in 1975 but did not report Smyth’s rampages to the gardaí — were, as we have said, so very disappointing and disheartening for the thousands of Catholics struggling to sustain a connection with the institution that seems to constantly challenge the three great tenets of their beliefs — faith, hope and charity.

The crisis is not just an Irish one as this terrible cancer of child rape followed by secrecy, denial and criminal collusion has reached the highest office in Catholicism. Pope Benedict who, as Cardinal Ratzinger, in January 1980, approved the transfer of Father “H”, a suspected paedophile, to Munich to undergo therapy. Father “H” then worked in pastoral care where he abused minors. It is believed he still works as a priest.

So, just as Cardinal Brady could have intervened to end the decades long predation of Fr Brendan Smyth Pope Benedict could have intervened to end Fr H’s career as a ordained paedophile. It is indeed shocking, and any loyal Catholic will feel it deeply, that those four names can be used in the same sentence.

They will be saddened too that new abuse inquiries in Germany, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland may reveal the kind of terrible abuses already uncovered in Ireland, America, Australia and Canada.

This is a sad testimony to how the Roman Catholic Church has gone so very far down the road towards self destruction because it could not, or would not, confront the evil in its midst.

This point could not have been reached unless the organisation was confident that it could contain the crisis. Nearly every intervention by a churchman was designed to contain scandal rather than end it. Everything from oaths of silence forced on abused children in 1975 to the letters — in Latin — from the Vatican to the Irish hierarchy, one of which instructed the hierarchy to keep the existence of an earlier letter secret, was designed to contain, not to confront.

It is this institutional confidence too that encourages the kind of delusion that passes for loyalty amongst our bishops. The kind of loyalty that encourages a collegiality of corruption rather than the honesty that makes Christianity’s great teachings real.

It is this institutional confidence that makes it unimaginable the Catholic hierarchy might even consider resigning en mass to facilitate a new beginning, a rebirth of the church that sustained this country and its people through the most challenging times.

Last night Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, whose current silence is in contrast with the determination he showed before his visit to Rome, had an opportunity to offer the kind of response that might suggest St Patrick’s legacy has a future. It is an indication of how deep and influential the malaise is that this brave man did not.