Madam, – I find the beatification of Pope John Paul II both confusing and worrying.
The passionate words of the late Pontiff when he proclaimed his “love” for the young people of Ireland in Galway in 1979 rang clearly in my ears as I watched the beatification ceremony on TV. It was during Pope John Paul’s papacy that most of the horrors of clerical child sex abuse were disclosed on a worldwide scale. Accounts of the rape, abuse, torture and torment of innocent children shook the world to its very core. Even more so, the accounts of the shielding and protection of clerical paedophiles by the hierarchy. The pope who was declared “Blessed” at the weekend actively put the good of the universal church before the safety of children.
Cardinal Seán Brady claimed on RTÉ news that if the late pontiff felt he could have done more, he would have done so. This is yet further verification that despite such unspeakably disturbing and conclusive reports as the Murphy Report, the Roman Catholic Church is still very much in a state of shameful denial.
Today I remembered the victims of clerical child sex abuse, the countless innocent lives so viciously destroyed by men of God and I wondered at the sincerity of the words spoken so very passionately by Christ’s representative on earth on that day in Galway when Ireland’s youth accepted the pontiff’s declaration of love with childlike innocence and trust. – Yours, etc,