‘YOU HAVE suffered grievously and I am truly sorry.” Pope Benedict’s unprecedented apology and pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland are welcome, though belated acknowledgments of the pain that the faithful, their children, and the church itself are suffering. “It is understandable,” he says, “that you find it hard to forgive or be reconciled with the Church. In her name, I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel.”
That contrition, and much in the letter, represent important steps: the recognition of the gravity of offences against children, the “sinful and criminal acts”, and of the betrayal of trust they represent; the injunction to abusive priests to give an “account of their actions and to conceal nothing”; the recommitment of the church to the new norms of child protection and to cooperation with the civil authorities; the critique of bishops, their “serious mistakes”, “grave errors of judgment” and “failures of leadership”; and the “firm purpose of amendment” to which his prayer adverts.
Yet, many may find bewildering the silences in the letter, not least on issues such as celibacy, lay empowerment, especially women, and the obligations on implicated bishops. They will also not find convincing the analysis of what went wrong. Victims have rightly pointed to the unwillingness to acknowledge that failures were not just those of individuals but systemic, rooted in the nature of the church, its structures and internal culture, in Ireland and globally – it has already cost the US church over $2 billion. Nor is there any suggestion that the Vatican should also hold up its hands; to do so could entail huge legal implications worldwide. The Papal Nuncio did not even respond to a letter from the Murphy Commission.
The Pope attributes to bishops a failure “to apply the long-established norms of canon law to the crime of child abuse”. He argues that such laxness stemmed from a culture he associates with the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council: secularisation, the neglect of confession, daily prayer, and annual retreats, and then the mistaken interpretation of its renewal programme. “In particular,” he states, “there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations.” In this he echoes the Murphy report’s finding that much of canon law’s criminal dimension, though not its code of secrecy, were ignored.
The letter acknowledges other important causative elements: inadequate vetting of priests and religious and weak moral formation in seminaries, an excessive social reverence for priests, and “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal”. Yet, those in charge of the Irish church from the 1950s were scarcely the liberals against whom the Pope rails regularly. His securalisation of the Church – meaning the introduction of social legislation such as contraception, separation and divorce for women – comes from an old-fashioned, authoritarian, mysoginistic church concerned above all with its reputation. Where are women? Much more to do, as the Pope said.