Comment on the Sugger O’Toole web site
As the Irish Catholic Church has stumbled through the aftermath of the sexual abuse scandals, one of the major complaints has been that the hierarchy has not and will not listen to the people in the pews.
In media coverage of Vatican attempts to manage the scandals, or of meetings of victims and survivors with clerics, victims/survivors say that they are not satisfied with the way the representatives of the Church have responded to them.
To take one example, after talks between the Pope and Irish Bishops in Rome last February, Andrew Madden, the first person in Ireland to publicly file a lawsuit against the church, simply said that survivors had been completely ignored. Similarly, some victims/survivors, like Colm O’Gorman, were outraged by the content of the Pope’s Pastoral Letter to the Catholic Church in Ireland.
I think that this lack of listening – whether perceived or real – has been behind the actions of people like Jennifer Sleeman, who called for a one-day boycott of mass across Ireland; or the people who organised the baby shoe protest at Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral last year. If you feel like the ‘leaders’ of your Church won’t listen to you, you have to take desperate measures.
The island of Ireland is currently experiencing an ‘Apostolic Visitation’, perceived by some as the Vatican’s genuine attempt to start seriously addressing the breakdown in the Irish Catholic Church, and seen by others as a cynical public relations exercise.
The Apostolic Visitors were in Northern Ireland late last month, and in the media coverage of that event I was struck by what was, for me at least, the first time I heard a victim/survivor comment favourably on a meeting with a high ranking cleric.
More at:
http://sluggerotoole.com/2011/02/09/is-the-irish-catholic-church-starting-to-listen/#comments