ON Erin’s green valleys and in her once-devoted towns and villages the call to honour a visiting pontiff was only sparsely answered. The visit of Pope Francis to Ireland last week carried none of the power and the glory of Pope John Paul II’s in 1979 and far less resonance. Francis, the Argentinian Jesuit. was not quite on his hands and knees seeking forgiveness for the sins of his church but he might as well have been.
Rarely has a Pope visiting a Catholic country felt the need to seek forgiveness in this way and never with such remorse. This wasn’t the Supreme Pontiff Of The Universal Church; Patriarch Of The West; Primate Of Italy; Archbishop And Metropolitan Of The Roman Province and Sovereign Of the Vatican. This was Francis paraphrasing Graham Greene’s whisky priest in the Power and the Glory. “God, forgive me – this is a proud, lustful, greedy church. It has loved authority too much. These people are martyrs – protecting me with their own lives. They deserve a martyr to care for them – not a church like this, which loves all the wrong things.”
Even this was not enough for some who had suffered grievously at the hands of predator priests and bishops or for others who had felt utterly betrayed by a hierarchy that preached the love and salvation of Christ but offered only exploitation and demanded obedience in return. Yet, how could any spoken apology ever heal a hurt endured over generations? Only a firm purpose of amendment backed up by radical action could achieve that, and it would only be a beginning.
What would Francis have said if he were ever to visit Scotland? Oh certainly the hierarchy would assure him that the scope of the problem was much smaller in Scotland and hadn’t they also instituted an independent inquiry into how the church had handled claims of historic sex abuse here?
They wouldn’t tell him that the McLellan Commission turned out to be a pointless whitewash that effectively allowed the Scottish bishops to say: “It won’t happen again.” Potentially thousands of survivors of abuse at the hands of predatory priests in Scotland are still seeking financial redress for their suffering and the means to seek proper medical attention for the psychological scars and physical wounds of their torment. I’ve been permitted to see the correspondence of one survivor with a bishop, still currently serving. It shows a man in authority absolutely uncoupled from reality and believing that a meeting between survivor and abuser and a
nice cup of tea will make everything alright.
Widespread anecdotal and documentary evidence provided by survivors’ groups and those sporadic cases where the law has broken through the silence and the concealment suggest that in Scotland it is more than just a handful of rogue priests who are guilty. The church here can never be cleansed until the full scope of generational abuse is uncovered and the perpetrators and their protectors named and jailed. One West of Scotland priest told me this year: “This whole mess, and it is a mess, has come about not only because of cover-ups, lies and deceit but also because of the two things that the authorities in the church have thrived on for centuries: power and control.”
Right now in Edinburgh, the seat of authority in the Scottish Catholic church, a stealthy bid for power and control is being carried out by a fringe outfit called the Faith Movement. Often, senior lay people have been relieved of their duties in several outreaches and ordered to make way for priests lacking relevant expertise and experience. Correspondence between a concerned group of ordinary, non-aligned Catholics about the activities of the Faith Movement and Archbishop Leo Cushley was abruptly ended when he expressed anger that the contents of a meeting would be shared with members. His attitude was one of a medieval baron telling his subjects that he was the boss and that was an end of it. “This church is hierarchical,” he told them.
The official website of Faith carries badly-written articles supporting the hardest lines on abortion and sexual morality. There is a blog urging us not to keep condemning Harvey Weinstein because we must all “love the sinner but hate the sin”. There is a defence of the sinister practice of holding anti-abortion vigils outside Scottish hospitals. There are details of youth summer camps, including one for six-nine-year-olds under the supervision of “experienced youth group leaders”, though there are no details of qualifications and disclosure certificates. These camps are held at Ampleforth, the grand and exclusive English Catholic independent school. I signed up for their monthly newsletter and my payment was duly acknowledged. I’ve yet to receive a reply to my polite request seeking more information about Faith.
The Faith Movement is on one side of a bitter civil war raging in Rome whose outcome carries profound consequences for its millions of ordinary adherents. Faith and other culture warriors who worship absolute doctrinal purity above all else are implacably opposed to all the attempts of Francis to restore some love and compassion and the actual teachings of Jesus into church doctrine. In many places this has been fashioned over the centuries by ageing men, drugged by power and possessions, for the sole purpose of terrorising the faithful into obedience on pain of hell and damnation.
This matters even in a secular world because where there is poverty, injustice and suffering there you will also find many good and ordinary Catholics and members of other Christian organisations attempting to save lives and stand against evil. The present wickedness at the heart of the Catholic Church threatens schism and an end to that. Perhaps a second Reformation to finish the job of the first one is now required.
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