Reflections on the Vatican report on abuse. Three well-established Irish journalists gave their reaction to the Vatican report – James Downey: Church can’t stem the tide of change; David Quinn: Bishops must pay heed to visitation’s crucial conclusions; Eamonn McCann – Vatican’s empty gesture is betrayal of abused children. There was criticism also of the Church’s attitude to victims.
James Downey: Church can’t stem the tide of change
Irish Independent – Michael Kelly, deputy editor of the ‘Irish Catholic’, reduced its message to less than one sentence in this newspaper on Wednesday: “In the Vatican’s view, authentic renewal of the church in Ireland will be brought about not by liberal reforms but by a return to traditional Catholic teaching.”
Roma locuta est, causa finita est. Rome has spoken, the case is ended. Is there anything more to be said?
There is indeed. The report essentially falls into two parts. One deals with the sex abuse scandals. It gives, to use the most polite word available, an incomplete account of the scandals and the role of the Vatican. That was predictable. The second part is more interesting.
The eminent visitors want seminarians to be segregated from their lay fellow students. John Charles McQuaid would surely have approved. St Thomas Aquinas might well have approved. But they lived long ago; in the case of Aquinas, a very long time ago. To us that view seems simply astonishing.
Downey concludes:
“They must know that one of the biggest arguments, for priests possibly the biggest of all, is the one about celibacy, something that has nothing to do with “theological opinions”.
“In England, the Catholic Church has gained a spectacular increase in power and influence. But many clergy and laity are perturbed by its decision to ordain married Anglican priests who have crossed over, and to allow them to remain married. They ask, reasonably, why a supposedly immutable law does not apply in this case. And they have taken note of the usual reason for the defections: ordination of women in the Church of England.
“Many Roman Catholics, in England and everywhere, want their own women priests, and they want married priests. These are the kind of people who want to do their own thinking. They are still outnumbered, in Ireland at any rate, by “traditional Catholics” who are content to let the church do their thinking for them. But that cannot last much longer.
“The peoples of most Western societies have come to terms with secularism. Ireland is different, because the Catholic Church has formed a huge part of the glue that holds our society together. Now institutions are at best weak, at worst collapsing, and the church faces relegation to minority status. Like other countries, we have to come to terms with that. We have to develop, not just a secular society, but a secular morality: we cannot throw moral principle out of the window. The report of the Apostolic Visitation offers no guidance. We will have to manage for ourselves.
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/james-downey-church-cant-stem-the-tide-of-change-3060252.html
David Quinn: Bishops must pay heed to visitation’s crucial conclusions
Irish Independent – The summary report of the papal inspection team — the Apostolic Visitation as it is properly called — published this week, points us firmly in the direction of authentic renewal through encouraging the church in Ireland to have the courage of its …
Quinn highlights the importance of the “magisterium” of the church – the arbiter of orthodoxy without which the Roman Catholic church would become protestant, and liberal protestant at that. This would be a fate which would also lead to its demise…
He concludes, “It should also be noted, as a simple matter of sociological fact, that the most liberal churches also tend to be the ones that have suffered the greatest loss in numbers.
Quite apart from the scandals, what has critically weakened the Catholic Church in Ireland, and religion generally, is a basic crisis of faith.
“Only a church that is united to the greatest extent possible, whose members accept the fundamental teachings of the church and know how to explain them to the wider society, has any possibility of addressing this crisis of faith and renewing itself.
“A church that can’t even agree on what it is has no hope of doing so.
“That is why the report issued this week is correct to emphasise the importance of loyalty to the magisterium. Now the job of our bishops is to act on the report’s recommendations. Have they the courage to do it?”
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/david-quinn-bishops-must-pay-heed-to-visitations-crucial-conclusions-3060015.html
Eamonn McCann – Vatican’s empty gesture is betrayal of abused children
Belfast Telegraph – Eamonn McCann writes – What emerges most starkly from the report by emissaries of the Holy See into child sex-abuse in Ireland is that there has been no change in the hierarchy of hypocrisy.
…The source and scale of the operation had encouraged expectations that the exercise would go some way towards tracing the problem to its roots – towards the role not just of the Church in Ireland, but of the Holy See, the global governance of the Church.
But the document published at a press conference in Maynooth did the opposite. It is a sustained effort to exculpate the Holy See, while pronouncing on the inadequacies of Irish bishops and religious superiors.
Inadequate they have undoubtedly been. But they took their lead from the top, specifically from the man who had a greater hand than any other in the orchestration of the cover-up of the crime-spree.
….The role of the Vatican in the scandal was made clear in last year’s 400-page report into abuse in the Diocese of Cloyne.
Judge Yvonne Murphy highlighted the relevance to the Cloyne events of a ‘strictly confidential’ letter sent to all Irish dioceses in 1997 by papal nuncio Archbishop Luciano Storero expressing “serious reservations of both a moral and canonical nature” about a proposal from the Irish bishops in a framework document to make the reporting of child sex abuse allegations to the civil authorities mandatory.
…It was against this background that Bishop John Magee and Monsignor Dennis O’Callaghan – the man charged with responsibility for child-protection in the diocese – had “positively lied” and “deliberately misled” the civil authorities and had created contradictory accounts of allegations of abuse – a true one for the Vatican, a false one for consumption by state agencies. This led Taoiseach Enda Kenny to tell the Dail that the Cloyne report had “exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic . . . The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold the primacy of the institution.”
The behaviour of the Vatican had heaped “humiliation and betrayal” on raped children.
And yet, just eight months later, here we have the Holy See’s representatives affecting distress at the way the Irish Church had “betrayed” Pope Benedict.
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/opinion/columnists/eamon-mccann/vaticans-empty-gesture-is-betrayal-of-abused-children-16134489.html#ixzz1q7DfJEAs
Vatican visitation report
Irish Times – a correspondent, Dr Margaret Kennedy, founder of MACSAS, claims that compensation packages are still fought vigorously by church lawyers and there is evidence that there is a hardening of response to victims. The Vatican’s sole recommendation is that “the Irish diocesan authorities and those of the religious institutes …
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/letters/2012/0323/1224313766786.html