Brendan Comiskey is among the most powerful orators in contemporary Ireland. When he speaks or writes about love and mercy, he makes the world seem like a perfect place. You want to believe him. Sometimes you do believe him. But last Tuesday his words rang false.
Tuesday was a bad day for children. In Dublin, a 12-year-old girl was raped on her way to school. In Gorey, Brendan Comiskey officiated at the funeral of Sean Fortune, the priest from his diocese who killed himself using alcohol and drugs. This was a moment when Comiskey's legendary verbal skills could have changed lives. Instead, his philosophy resembled little more than the cheap print on a mass-produced tea towel. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
That was the bishop's advice.
Sean Fortune committed suicide while being prosecuted on 29 counts of child sex abuse. It was an act of supreme arrogance. In killing himself before his victims had the chance to tell their stories in court, he denied them one of the best therapeutic ways they had to start healing. Fortune was a grandiose man, big, brutal, and massively egotistic. Alison O'Connor's powerful reports about his case and his legacy testify to that above all else. It is difficult to see what, if anything, he held sacred.
Any dark nights of the soul he may have had were apparently obscured by drink and debauchery. Unless we decide to understand his life as one long, dark night.
You can condemn Sean Fortune's actions without condemning his soul. For some strange reason, Bishop Comiskey did not do so. The bishop, as O'Connor reported, was advised on a number of occasions of the real and present danger he presented to the community. He knew Fortune well, having been entertained by him when he visited the parish. But other than acknowledging the victims' pain, and asking for prayers to help them "find some peace of mind and some healing", Bishop Comiskey resorted to the language of the bureaucrat. "I recognise that, because of the particular circumstances, there may be some reluctance on the part of some to avail of any offer of help from the church. Nevertheless, I once again offer the services of the diocese and my own services to help in whatever way we can. God strengthen you, God comfort you. Hope in God, believe in him still."
This is simply not good enough. If what the bishop says is what he actually means, his lack of insight into how it feels to be a victim of abuse is staggering. His estimation of his and his diocese's professional ability to counsel them is surely inflated. Finally, his words indicate that his diocese is still not prepared to examine the possibility that it acted as an accessory, either knowingly or otherwise, in facilitating the persistent abuse of local children by their parish priest.
What distinguishes the Fortune case from other sex abuse offences is the climate in which it was being prosecuted. Leading members of the Catholic Church in Ireland have been briefed on many aspects of child sex abuse because of the charges levelled against them since the 1980s. They have taken advice in every sense of the term. They know the consequences for victims of staying silent.
They probably know that, for years, nobody believed people when they said they had been sexually abused. Sigmund Freud found the prospect so unthinkable that he invented a whole ideology about sexual fantasies to explain the reports from his patients. Trainee social and medical workers in the 1960s were fed Weinberg's statistic that the rate of child sex abuse amounted to an average of one in one million people in English-speaking countries. Now, we all know how terribly badly they got it wrong.
We are less knowledgeable, however, about the rate of abuse against boys, who were Fortune's victims of choice. Girls are obvious victims. Boys are not. However upsetting it is for a girl to be sexually abused, she can with proper counselling painfully come to realise that it was not her fault. But boys have obvious involuntary physiological responses, which can make sexual abuse extremely confusing for them. So boys tell less often, and when they do tell, they are less likely to be believed.
Hence the desperation of one of Sean Fortune's victims. Last week, he allowed his own privacy to be invaded so that people could have some idea of how gross was the offence committed against him. He released to an Irish newspaper a video tape showing Father Fortune naked and in the act of abuse.
COPING with the legacy of child abuse needs more than the banal meditations of popular psychology. This is not a disease in which we need to recite our intention to improve one day at a time. It is an abuse of power which runs deep in this society. What has changed things now is that we have no more excuses open to us.
The awful reality of abuse is that children are in most danger from their own families. "Stranger danger", like the child rape case in Dublin last week, are frightening for parents but actually represent a minority of rape cases against children. What is of real concern is our continued failure to change the culture within which avoidable abuse takes place. The legal system is already demonstrably inept in prosecuting child abuse: as in adult rape cases, most will never get to court. That is no excuse for not working to improve the legal and social structures which can deter, prevent or at least make it more difficult to abuse children. In that context, the Minister for Justice, Mr O'Donoghue's, proposed register of sex offenders may not actually prevent all future abuses, but it will kick-start a climate within which changes of attitudes can start to happen.
Brendan Comiskey can make a unique contribution to the issue. The diocese of Ferns is in a good position to offer leadership in changing that climate. The bishop has it within his power to facilitate Sean Fortune's victims in collectively telling their own stories, as they need to do.
There is no reason why they cannot come together at his invitation to tell their stories, and be relieved of their burden. Not as a witch-hunt, or a J'Accuse against the Catholic Church, but as a new testament, published for the rest of us under the bishop's seal. If he can muster enough courage.