CHURCH SCANDALS:This was the year when the Catholic Church was finally forced to account for its actions, in the face of two horrific reports, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE
COMING IN TO 2009, the Catholic Church and the Government knew at some level that this would be the year of truth. The Ryan commission on child abuse in church-run industrial schools and the Murphy commission on the cover-up of thousands of assaults on children by priests in the Dublin diocese had been sitting for some years.
The broad reality of the industrial-school system had already been detailed by survivors and, more clinically, by Eoin O'Sullivan and Mary Raftery in their book Suffer the Little Children. The system of cover-up that enabled clerical paedophiles to carry on with impunity had been previewed in the report on the Ferns diocese. Indeed, the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin explicitly warned the faithful that the Murphy report would "shock us all".
Given that the essence of the two reports was already known, and that the church and State authorities had so much time to prepare their responses, two obvious questions arise. Why did those reports indeed “shock us all”? And why did the authorities flounder for even a vaguely adequate response?
Part of the answer to the first question lies in the propensity for Irish culture to have “unknown knowns” – things that are known to be true but are treated as if they are outlandish fictions. No honest person seriously doubted that the industrial schools were instruments of terror and torture – why, otherwise, were children threatened with Letterfrack and Daingean, words that induced a numbing chill of fear? Likewise, many of the abusive priests were not secretive but behaved, on the contrary, with a flagrant and swaggering arrogance.
Yet, as dramatists have understood since the time of the ancient Greeks, there is often much more power in being forced to confront what you already know than in being amazed by the unexpected. And here, the language of both the Ryan and Murphy reports played a crucial role.
In both cases, the reports were written with a cold, clinical, relentless and above all unequivocal clarity. There were no qualifications, no escape hatches, no grounds for the “yes, but . . . ” or “what about . . . ?” that had been the constant refuge of the religious orders, the hierarchy and their apologists in the media. The lies, evasions and equivocations had to stop.
It mattered, too, that in the case of both reports, the conclusions focused on the systemic nature of the crimes. In its detail and horror, the Ryan report often read like a cross between an anthropological study and a novel by the Marquis de Sade. Images – for example, the Christian Brother who played ceili music loudly on the radio to drown out the screams of the child he was torturing – burned themselves into the brains of those who read it.
But the report also drove home the fact that this was not just a nightmare but a calculated system of institutionalised violence and enslavement endured by an astonishing 170,000 children between 1936 and 1970.
Similarly, the Murphy report refused to take refuge in merely denouncing the crimes and collusion of individuals, but stressed the systemic nature of the abuse and cover-up. Its devastating conclusion that the church routinely subordinated the welfare of children to “the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets” stripped bare the whole institution’s claim to moral authority.
Yet the overwhelming scale and unblinking clarity of the conclusions of the two reports merely served to highlight the inability of either the church itself or the Government to grasp what was happening. In relation to the Ryan report, both church and State seemed to believe that it would be a nine-day wonder.
Both the Taoiseach and the Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe were quickly off the blocks to say that the 2002 indemnity deal, in which the religious orders contributed just €128 million to costs of €1.1 billion, would not be re-opened. The orders, many of which had continued with a campaign of obstruction and denial throughout the Ryan commission process, naturally endorsed this stand.
It took Michael O'Brien's five-minute outburst of controlled rage from the audience of Questions and Answers("Eight of us from the one family, dragged by the ISPCC cruelty man. Put in to two cars, brought to the court in Clonmel. Left standing there without food or anything, and the fella in the long black frock and the white collar came along and he put us in to a van . . . And landed us below with 200 other boys. Two nights later I was raped.") to force the Government and the orders to admit that the deal could, after all, be re-opened.
A similar pattern emerged with the Murphy report. The church authorities, with the exception of Archbishop Martin, seemed to be paralysed by the sheer novelty of a situation in which they were being asked to account for themselves. The Taoiseach ended up muttering craven excuses for the Vatican’s refusal to deal with the commission, demonstrating that a long habit of approaching the Holy See from a supine position had not been broken.
The irony was that the State was struggling to accept what was obvious to all thinking church people – that the 19th-century institutional Catholicism that had dominated the moral and psychological life of Ireland for so long was dead.
While theologians, active lay Catholics and even some bishops were beginning to face up to a very different future, mainstream political culture was still in denial. It seemed terrified of the implications of having to create a republic in which neither morality or social obligations could be outsourced.
