Catholic Church must confront its past of child sexual abuse and confess guilt

In a very perceptive recent article in this newspaper Jim Duffy suggested that the besetting sin of the Catholic Church in Ireland was arrogance. He is right. Memories of the arrogance of clerical power are at the root of the present alienation from the church.

Jim Duffy was generous in his comments on the many priests and religious men and women who served their people in a life-giving way.

Earlier this year, the RTE television series States of Fear confronted the Catholic Church and civil society in Ireland with case-histories of the treatment experienced by young children in orphanages and industrial schools.

It was shocking to hear that children already damaged were beaten and abused in buildings adorned with the symbols of a religion rooted in God's infinite love, and to hear that some or most of the agents of violence and fear were priests, brothers and sisters.

It was pointed out that these were few in number, while many brothers and nuns were kind and devoted. It was alleged, however, that many good people were aware of violent abuses and apparently did nothing.

There is clearly widespread alienation from the Catholic Church in Ireland. Many people think it has lost its authority as a source of spiritual strength . It is no longer a source of treasured spiritual wisdom - so it is felt by many.

The sense of alienation is manifest to all. To retrieve its life-giving mission, the Irish Catholic Church must undertake a difficult moral journey.

In October 1998, a significant event took place in Rome which throws suggestive light on the nature of the task which faces the church in Ireland. The Vatican's Jubilee commission organised a historical symposium in the Vatican. Historians of the Inquisition were invited, in order to build up a coherent account of the various inquisitions, from their beginnings to their dissolution.

The purpose of the historical study was to enable the church to confront its history of persecution and lethal violence. This was to provide the basis for a solemn act of "purification of memory in penitence".

Significantly, a Jewish historian present suggested that asking pardon for the past was unreal, and an evasion of responsibility; the dead could not forgive. He would prefer to hear the Pope and the church say that they were ashamed of the past, without seeking easy absolution.

Leaving aside the complexity of communal repentance, the overall purpose of the Vatican symposium was to confront the structural sin within the church as institution, as well as the sins of its individual members.

All of this is directly relevant to the Catholic Church in Ireland. Individual religious orders have shown courage in confronting their institutional failures as well as those of their members. Now is the time for the church as an institution to identify its sinfulness in a disciplined, historical way, and then to confess its guilt.

This is central to any attempt to repair the broken lives of victims of abuse by church personnel. In some cases, the brokenness includes a shattered faith in God, and the inability to trust in human relationships. One may recall here the great German Protestant theologian and martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, put to death by the Gestapo in April 1945 for his part in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer deplored the failure of the Christian churches to provide effective opposition to the Nazi terror and to defend the Jewish victims.

In 1940 he wrote the outlines for a full confession of guilt, which he urged upon his own church. His words are imbued with the authority of a man who had given up everything in order to stand alongside the victims of tyranny.

"The church confesses that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force, the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people, oppression, hatred and murder, and that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims and has not found ways to hasten to their aid.

"She is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenceless brothers of Jesus Christ . . .

"The church confesses her timidity, her evasiveness, her dangerous concessions. She has often been untrue to her office of guardianship and to her office of comfort and through this she has often denied to the outcast and to the despised compassion which she owes them. She was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was crying aloud to heaven."

The course of action which Bonhoeffer urged on his church in Germany is essential to the life of the Christian church in every time and place. Abuses of power, abuses of trust, violence inflicted on individuals in its care are some of the elements in what should be an authentic confession of guilt. This could take place in a national synod or other appropriate forum.

The journey which is proposed here has nothing to do with "public relations". It is demanded by the fundamental Christian dynamic of conversion, repentance, confession of guilt, leading to forgiveness and new life.

At a time of complex modernisation, the church is needed more than ever as a place of personal and collective rebirth and renewal. To be spiritually alive and credible in a post-Catholic society, the Irish Catholic Church has to confront its recent history.

Breifne Walker is a missionary priest. He has a doctorate in theology from Trinity College Dublin and has been teaching moral theology in Enugu, Nigeria