Rite and Reason: It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Catholic bishops' 2005 'Towards Healing' document, on assisting victims of clerical child sex abuse, was anything more than a PR exercise, writes Seán Ó Conaill.
'Contemporary man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers . . . He feels . . . an instinctive revulsion for everything that appears as pretence, facade or compromise."
These words of Pope Paul VI were quoted to Ireland's Catholic bishops by Pope John Paul II on their last ad limina visit to Rome in 1999. That call to authenticity could not have been more opportune, but, in the years since 1999, Ireland's bishops have generally continued the credibility slide that had begun in 1992 with Bishop Eamon Casey's flight to the US.
The impact is plain to see in Ireland's increasingly unattended Sunday Masses.
An ad limina visit is a return to "the threshold" - to the scene of the martyrdom of the great apostles, Peter and Paul. Martyrdom is a sure test of authenticity, but in the long centuries between then and now the political success of the church changed utterly the role of those original apostles.
Mendicant evangelists under constant threat of imprisonment, or worse, were replaced by territorial grandees too often preoccupied by ambition rather than the gospels. The national revolution of 1916-22 gave Irish bishops the same status French bishops had enjoyed in the last decades of the ancien regime.
The archbishop of Dublin, Dr John McQuaid, soon proved all over again that privilege is disastrous for the cause of authenticity, by treating his laity (even some who were ministers of State) as mindless minions. Ireland had no need of the reforms mooted by the Second Vatican Council of 1963-65, he judged - so this opportunity to end the deadly reign of Irish clericalism was thrown away. Secularism has reaped the harvest.
Authenticity is not entirely lacking among Irish Catholic bishops today, thank God. The Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, has shown that humility, humanity and humour are not incompatible with his office, and he has won national respect for openly discussing critical issues.
The Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Diarmuid Martin, has made strenuous efforts to cast his office in a mould very different from that of Dr McQuaid, and to involve laity in parish decisions.
Dr Éamonn Walsh, replacing Dr Brendan Comiskey as bishop of Ferns, set a standard for the handling of the child abuse issue. Other bishops are at least triers who search for a different way.
But what are we to make of the failure of most bishops to follow through on the promise they made in the document, Towards Healing, in February 2005 - to lead the whole church community in a movement of solidarity and support for all victims of abuse?
It is hard to escape the conclusion that Towards Healing was no more than a PR exercise, and that most of our bishops have no passionate interest in healing the wounds caused by their church's dysfunction, or in ending that dysfunction. They still have to admit that the root cause of the cover-up of abuse was their supposed fraternal obligation to preserve the elite status of clergy.
We lay people must remain outsiders, because our church must remain essentially a church for insiders - the ordained. This is still, sadly, the working ecclesiology of too many Irish Catholic diocesan clergy, many bishops among them.
The men who flew to Rome for the ad limina visit just ended, and the pope himself, must realise that the call to authenticity cannot be met while holding on to elitism and unaccountability. The only effective lesson is that unaccountability is always morally disastrous - but the church system itself seems to be unable to learn that lesson.
And the most glaring malady of modern culture - the craze for celebrity - cannot be challenged by those bishops who cling to social grandeur and give every indication that they think their ministry exists primarily to dignify themselves, rather than to restore the lost dignity of clericalism's many victims.
Seán Ó Conaill is a retired teacher who lives in Coleraine where he is co-ordinator of the lay Voice of the Faithful (Ireland) group