Backlash against clergy was inevitable

In a letter to The Irish Times of August 21st Father Denis Egan wrote of "the lynch mob which has demonised priests and nuns in recent years." Father Egan is right. Priests and nuns have frequently been unfairly attacked. But that assault is no mere media conspiracy. It reflects genuine public anger.

No single institution has had as much power in 20th-century Ireland as the Catholic Church. And, as the maxim states, "Power corrupts." In thousands of ways, some small and trivial, some massive, the institutional church and its clergy hurt people who, because of its power and because it claimed to have God on its side, felt powerless to defend themselves.

Unchecked by weak politicians and a fearful public, it trampled upon those with whom it disagreed, leaving a legacy of hidden but bitter resentment that was guaranteed to come to the surface.

I remember as a child in the 1970s being struck by the arrogance of various churchmen I came across. Such as the local parish priest, now long dead, who saw my 10 and 11-year-old classmates as cheap labour.

Whenever the mood took him he would march into the local national school and just inform the teacher that he was removing children from the class for the day to cut his grass, clean his windows, weed the cemetery, or whatever. He saw himself as the representative of God in the parish who could do as he pleased, with no one, not least the teacher he appointed, being able to say "no".

This is a relatively trivial example. There are many worse ones. Recent listeners to Liveline will have heard horror stories of the lengths to which the late Noel Browne was vilified. Browne was no saint, and much of the self-serving claims in his memoir, Against the Tide, are openly disproved in the archives of the time.

Nevertheless, the extent to which he was demonised, while largely powerless to defend himself, was astonishing. As were stories like that of the convent girl brutally beaten by a nun because she refused to rip down election posters of Browne, as the nun had demanded.

The only difference between the character assassination Browne experienced, and the sickening description recently of Sonia O'Sullivan as "a slut" by a priest, was that in 1999 people were able to stand up to the priest and force an apology.

In 1925 a Church of Ireland member later to become our first President, Dr Douglas Hyde, was not so lucky when he was venomously attacked by priests and the Catholic Truth Society. That hatchet job cost him his Seanad seat.

From Hyde to Browne down to ordinary people, all too many were victims of "steamroller Catholicism", in which balance and fairness went out the window in the face of crude moral lectures and hectoring. Even in the early 1990s Catholicism could destroy people.

Take one college friend of mine, a young man in his 20s: intellectually brilliant, a talented Gaelic footballer tipped to play for his county, and deeply, passionately religious; someone who had contemplated the priesthood himself.

He had one problem. For years he struggled to reconcile his faith with the realisation that he was gay. Finally, after a decade, he had come to accept himself, came out to himself, his family and friends, and fell in love.

BUT he made one, quite literally fatal, error. He told his local priest. That bigoted cleric, who understood nothing about homosexuality, hounded him, told his parents their son was a paedophile, a threat to his brothers, sisters and nephews, a threat to good Christian marriage in the community.

He preached a hate-filled queerbashing sermon, and offered to set the young man up with bizarre "Christian therapy groups" who would "cure" his "disease". My friend became severely depressed before taking his own life.

The final twist occurred when, the night after his funeral, a bunch of his friends and family, mainly heterosexual, accompanied his boyfriend to Dublin's main gay pub to drink to his memory. There the dead man's brother was propositioned by a Catholic priest!

The whole affair left me so angry that the following Sunday I found myself having to run out of a church at the start of Mass, feeling sick even to be in a church after what the institution had done to my friend. It was over a year before I could physically set foot in a church again.

Of course these occasions may be unrepresentative. Ireland has been the better for so many of its wonderful priests and nuns. People like Father Sean Healy, the Fathers Finucane, Bishop Willie Walsh, Sister Stanislaus Kennedy, Sister Margaret McCurtain, Brother Michael O'Brien and Sister Regis, the latter two being my own grand-uncle and grand-aunt.

The trouble with Catholicism for many people has been that not alone had it almost unchallenged power but there was also that special arrogance - a belief that not merely the Pope but just about every ordained cleric and nun was infallible in whatever they did.

SO THAT when Father Brendan Smyth raped children the church did not think it should get outside advice (even though outside experts, long before the church and its own advisers, knew that people like him should never be allowed near children again). It did not even think it had to report him to the Garda, it resented media investigation, and attacked a fellow "whistle-blower" priest rather than Smyth.

It was that mentality which allowed Bishop Eamonn Casey to believe it acceptable to flee the State when news of his antics broke, and do his "penance" abroad in the Third World rather than answer to the ordinary people whose trust he had shattered.

That is why the Vatican tried to strip Father Jean Bertrand Aristide (the Haitian president) of his priesthood for daring to break church rules by running for election, while showing none of the same speed or interest in removing Smyth from the priesthood. It is also seen in the virtual denials some priests and nuns still show when confronted.

I overheard one nun describe a woman brutalised at Goldenbridge as "a hussy", while a priest in an Irish Times letter recently attacked those making claims about Goldenbridge, implying nuns were saintly, innocent victims of wild accusations. He should sit down and meet the real victims sometime.

In this post-Casey/Smyth/Golden bridge/Artane/Cleary era, the church is now itself the victim of the same steamrolling judgmentalism it practised in the past. Yes, it is unfair. But it is a gut reaction from among people whose family members, friends or themselves were treated in the same way.

Hopefully, when the ghosts of the past are exorcised, the healing can begin and a sense of balance will return, with people learning to differentiate between those in religious life who deserve the bitterness and condemnation, and those others, the great majority, who never wronged anyone and deserve our respect.

But that will happen only when the anger of recent decades has been expressed by a people who, until now, were terrified of the church and its power, only when they have shown their real anger at the way they were treated for so long.

Jim Duffy is a writer and commentator