Catholic Church needs root and branch change
WHEN I was a child my grandmother, a Protestant who had fled the south of Ireland in the 1920s, warned me that if I was bad I might be "sent to the nuns or the Christian brothers", who would beat and starve me.
Catholic religious I had met were usually kind and helpful, so I assumed her comments were bigotry but, as we learn more about what has been covered up, it seems that she had a point. It is becomingly increasingly hard to defend the Catholic Church's treatment of children – the worst that could have been alleged by its opponents is turning out to be pretty close to the mark.
When the damning Murphy report came out, I commended Cardinal Brady for his openness and wrote in another paper last December that "Pope Benedict's outrage at the scale of clerical sex abuse uncovered by the Murphy report is welcome, but it doesn't go far enough."
Now a huge child sex scandal is engulfing Germany and both the Pope and his brother, who led a boys' choir, have been mentioned in the coverage, although they deny wrong doing. In the past I would have been inclined to believe them, now I am keeping an open mind.
It is becoming clear that the problems of the Catholic Church are not just a question of a few bad individuals like Fr Eugene Green, described by Gardai as "the most prolific rapist in Ireland" or Father Brendan Smyth, who used his 40- year career as a priest to abuse at least 20 children in Dublin, Belfast and America.
These are not individual lapses. They are part of a systemic failure which the Church hierarchy has, by its action and inaction, allowed to continue for decades. Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist, has written the seminal study of how cruel behaviour develops in military organisations and prisons. His conclusion is that rotten apples are a sign of rotten barrels, and when bad behaviour is noted, deep institutional reform is as necessary as the punishment of individuals.
He identifies the short term protection of the institution as the major obstacle to reform. In the case of the Catholic Church, a central problem is the unrealistic attempt to preserve the fiction that its 500,000 priests worldwide will be able to maintain celibacy throughout their adult lives. This is an unrealistic expectation, a lie in plain language, from which much of the need for cover up flows.
Zimbardo writes, in the context of military and political systems, that "to encourage the sacrifice of youth for the sake of advancing the ideologies of the old must be considered a form of evil that transcends local politics and expedient strategies."
Clergy, comfortable passing judgement on the secular world, may rationalise their decision to let a paedophile move on after offending as necessary to prevent scandal and loss of faith. But that is just another way of saying that, as Zimbardo put it, they are prepared to sacrifice the young to advance the ideology of the old. An attitude of kindness towards the young and vulnerable and wariness of the corrupting effects of power characterise most great moral and religious systems.
The Catholic church's structures were not set up to do this. It has been known for decades that abuse was endemic. As long ago as 1952, Fr Michael Fitzgerald, who founded the Order of the Servants of the Paraclete (OSP) to deal with sexually errant priests, informed the church authorities “we are amazed to find how often a man would be behind bars if he were not a priest entrusted with the cura animarum” (the care of souls). He advocated moving paedophiles to an island where they would be insulated from the rest of the world.
He was funded for a while to set up clinics but even he never seems to have considered the obvious expedient of going to the police and letting those charged with the care of souls face the same penalties anyone else caught abusing the young. The instinct was to handle these things in house.
Following Fitzgerald’s campaign on the subject the Vatican issued a document, Crimen Sollicitationis, which specifies that victims of child abuse should be required to sign an oath of secrecy. It was issued in 1962 by a Congregation of the Holy Office, a Vatican Body which Pope Benedict later headed in his role as a cardinal between 1981 and 2005. It was this oath which Cardinal Brady applied.
It may be valid in canon law but this paper advocates conspiracy to pervert the course of justice – withholding information on a crime from the prosecuting authorities. All who are tainted by such a system should admit they were wrong and offer their resignation.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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