RITE & REASON:The great significance of the drift from the Catholic Church today is that it is not the weak who are leaving but the strong
WHAT HAS brought the Catholic Church in Ireland to its present sorry state is not just the clerical sex scandal, bad and all as that is.
Nor is it the failure of the bishops and the cardinal to understand the nature of the accusations against them and the inadequacy of their response. The reason for the reaction against them goes much deeper.
What has not yet been fully comprehended is that underneath the anger and rejection is a deep sense of betrayal. We knew the church to be human and therefore fallible. What had not been realised, despite abundant lessons from history, was that it could be corrupt, dishonest and deceitful. That is the lesson we are now learning and the lesson is hurtful. What might have gone some way towards healing the wound would have been a spontaneous decision by the cardinal and bishops involved to resign immediately the Murphy report was published.
Archbishop Martin instinctively and correctly realised this but no bishop, except Bishop Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin, resigned on principle.
The inadequate apologies of the cardinal and most of the bishops and the cavalier treatment of the issue by Bishop Magee have done more harm than good. A serious rift has opened between the institution and its members that will not easily be bridged.
The importance of the drift from the church is that it is not the weak that are leaving but the strong that have thought through their response and are taking a rational decision.
They are not the sort of cultural Catholics who go to Mass because it is the done thing and not to go would attract unwelcome attention and gossip.
What they are doing is breaking off contact with a church they no longer consider to be the church Jesus Christ commanded Peter and the Apostles to build. So far as is known they are not joining any other church. They are waiting to see what is going to happen. There is little doubt that they would come back if the church, through the pope and the bishops, showed a proper understanding of what the clerical sex scandal really implies and displayed a convincing degree of responsibility and contrition for what happened.
There is one hope on the horizon. It is that the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland will be forced into completely revising how religion is taught. In the past, instead of teaching its members to “love, honour and obey God”, what the church has done is to teach them to love, honour and obey the church. We need to learn that faith – a belief in God and acceptance of the fundamental doctrines of the Apostles’ Creed – is not the same as religion that is a way of practising that faith. We can disagree with the practice, as many of us do over the new translation of the Missal, without in any way repudiating our faith in God.
We need to be convinced that the church is not perfect, that it does not consist solely of pope, bishops, priests and religious and that the Holy Spirit works equally well through the lay men and women who form the People of God. It would be too optimistic to expect that the initiative for such a volte-face will come from the present pope or his curia administrators. It will come only from a lay movement convinced that the Holy Spirit wants them to work for a different church from the one that allowed the clerical abuse scandal to be dealt with in such an arrogant, inconsiderate and unChristian fashion.
Desmond Fisher is a former editor of the the Catholic Herald, and reported on the Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. He is also author of The Church in Transition, published in 1967.