DUBLIN:THE POPE's pastoral letter was "part of a project, part of a strategy of a renewal of the church", the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin has said.
Speaking before Mass at the Pro-Cathedral on Saturday evening, he said he was “glad there is no hint of revisionism by the pope” in the letter. “Basically, it is saying the church failed. That fear of scandal was very much at the root of the cover-up, and the privileged position of clergy.”
Acknowledging the Vatican’s response “was not as quick as we would have liked” on some child protection matters, he said it was “very clear had bishops followed the norms in place, things would not have been as disastrous as they are.
“This was a horrendous scandal. Church authorities got it spectacularly wrong,” he said.
“Responsibility was very much that of the Irish church. The Vatican had produced the norms of canon law and they weren’t respected in the management of these cases.”
In his homily at the Mass, he said “the church in Ireland has for long had a very strong judgmental trait. We were taught a great deal about sins and sins were listed and catalogued. Church leaders, but also indeed individuals and communities, often thought that their own judgmentalism was justified by their representing the anger and the wrath of God.
“I believe that to a great degree because of the lack of a real Biblical foundation in our faith education, we at times lost contact with the true Christian God.”
Speaking about the papal letter, he said “it deals with a painful chapter in the life of the Irish church. It deals with a dramatically painful chapter in the lives of the many who were abused.”
It was “not a commentary or guidelines about the management of sexual abuse. It is a much broader reflection of the pope on the failings of the church in Ireland and the future of the church in Ireland.”
The church “tragically failed many of its children: it failed through abuse; it failed through not preventing abuse; it failed through covering up abuse”, he said. Child-protection measures needed to be “constantly updated; more participation of lay men and woman is needed to avoid a false culture of clericalism”.
Speaking to the archbishop after the Mass, residential abuse victim Christine Buckley pointed out that clerical abuse was mentioned before institutional abuse in the papal letter. “We regard what we went through as much more serious,” she said.
“We lived in hell, you know, and it needs to be acknowledged. This is not just about clerical abuse. Abuse is abuse and we did not have families. We had absolutely nobody. We were betrayed by the State and, in many cases, well I can only speak about myself, by parents.”
She said, “This is my first time since 1999 to attend Mass. I can’t return to Mass permanently until our people, 165,000 children, are mentioned in every diocese because in every diocese, there was an institution, high walls, where children were totally and utterly destroyed.”
Archbishop Martin said he fully understood that the experience of abuse was very different for children in institutions “where you had no recourse to anybody”.