Let’s draw a line between the bishops and the powerless laity

ALTHOUGH it has been customary for Irish media to equate the Irish Catholic Church with its clerical hierarchy, there is surely now an overwhelming case for abandoning this practice.

Since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s the Catholic Church is properly understood as its entire membership, the 'people of God' almost all of them laity. Furthermore, although the council clearly envisaged permanent structures for upward communication from laity to hierarchy, this commitment has been reneged upon by the Irish hierarchy ever since to the severe detriment of Irish Catholic families who could find no mechanism within the church to represent and protect them when injured by their clergy.

In the light of the shameful failure of the hierarchy to protect its laity from clerical child abuse, and to minister adequately to those lay Catholics who have been abused, should the Catholic Church i.e., mostly its laity be further abused by inaccurate media references to 'Catholic Church scandals' when, in fact, these scandals are exclusively clerical and hierarchical? And when laity the vast majority of the Church - are in almost all cases the victims?

This is particularly important in articles allegedly relying on information or statements from spokespersons 'for the Irish Catholic Church.' There is none such as the Catholic Church in Ireland lacks a national synod or other structure for the determination of its views on any matter although canon law and Vatican II provide for these.

What surveys we have suggest that after four decades of organisational inertia, and a decade of scandal, maladministration and pastoral neglect of victimised Irish Catholic families, the Irish Catholic hierarchy are now held to have insulted and alienated the laity of their own church, and can therefore no longer be assumed to speak for the Irish Catholic Church as a whole.

The same conclusion follows from the collapse of lay interest in maintaining the clerical system by encouraging their sons to join it.

Eventually, when the full dimensions of the current crisis have been measured by the hierarchy, we Irish lay Catholics may be for the very first time - embodied and consulted in a manner that would allow the media once more to report hierarchical doings as the doings of our Church as a whole.

Until then, surely, the current appalling mess should be laid at the door of the few dozen who have created it not inaccurately and unfairly ascribed to several million other Catholics who include its many victims.

Sean O'Conaill,

2 Greenhill Rd.,

Coleraine,

Co Derry.