Christianity and hypocrisy

MARGARET HICKEY (Letters, August 1) operates a diligent and vigilant perspective in her comparative dissection of the child abuse revelations of the past recent years.

One wonders, though, what her underlying driving force really is. To parse and pickle the various reports is at once both laudable and self-defeating.

The state has indeed failed many family situations in respect of child protection. But the Catholic Church has long travelled the pious road of purity of esteem and holy divine righteousness, while it simultaneously and knowingly violated, manipulated and grotesquely subordinated the fragile rights of children to protect its own selfish power systems.

The hypocrisy of espousing Christian love and care, while subversion of this deceptive, corruptive magnitude was being perpetrated not in only in Ireland, but worldwide, is by any standards flabbergasting. No comparative dilution of balancing contexts will rescue this abomination of trust. A full, willing and open acceptance of failure, accompanied by abject contrition with the appropriate retributions offered in an authentic generosity of spirit, is the only truly Christian response.

Jesus scorned any sense of hierarchy, power-mongering or manipulative concealment, and energetically championed the plight and rights of children as exemplars of innocent correctitude. Aren’t we Christians supposed to be followers of his words and teachings. The Vatican is a man-made entity. Its track-record has been seriously and regularly flawed by scandal and idiosyncratic edict throughout the ages. Why should it presume to control operations in a fundamentally un-Christian manner? The body of the Roman Catholic church, aka the people in the pews, will not have it any more ... and rightly so.

Diarmuid Martin, along with many other clergy figures, has agreed that the ‘truth must out’. Sad that the full truth has to be extracted by enforced surgical procedure, rather than via Christian spiritual awareness of right and wrong. Whether the State’s commissions and omissions are rightly condemned or properly addressed is no excuse for the church to plead parity of culpability in its paltry defence. Jesus Christ would be extremely saddened to behold the current state of play.

As Ghandi might have said, ”Christianity sounds like a good idea. We should try it some day.”

Jim Cosgrove

Lismore

Co Waterford