Some in Church Leadership Still Don't Get It

It has been a year in which the impossible seems to be happening almost on a monthly basis. A reigning British queen has paid a visit to Croke Park. A black American president has sipped a pint of Guinness in his ancestral village of Moneygall. And now a Taoiseach has stood in the Dail and, at great length, openly lambasted the Catholic church leadership and the Vatican over its handling of the horrors of Ireland's clerical sex abuse legacy.

Enda Kenny’s speech concerned the recent report into child abuse in Cloyne, a Catholic diocese in County Cork. It revealed that in 2008 two cases of child sex abuse had been referred to the National Board for Safeguarding Children, an independent body established by Irish bishops, and when they tried to investigate the matter they got no cooperation from the diocese under Bishop John Magee. It also found that stringent self-regulatory child protection standards proposed by the church in 1996 had still not been implemented in the diocese by February 2008.

Mr Kenny denounced the hierarchy's handling of the situation and the horrors revealed in a succession of reports. The Cloyne report "exposes an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an Inquiry in a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago. And in doing so, the Cloyne Report excavates the dysfunction, disconnection, elitism, the narcissism that dominate the culture of the Vatican to this day. The rape and torture of children were downplayed or 'managed' to uphold instead, the primacy of the institution, its power, standing and reputation."

If ever a man was saying what he really felt, this was it. It will go down in history as one of the great Irish political speeches.

Equally as intriguing as Mr Kenny's speech itself is the positive reception that it has received throughout the country, including increasingly vocal elements within the church. The Association of Catholic Priests, a union of rebel Catholic clergy, praised the speech for its "dignity and strength". There are reports of people walking out of chapels during mass as soon as any priests try to downplay the seriousness of the revelations in the reports.

Perhaps the most notable voice of all has been that of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, the Primate of Ireland and a man with whom this column has often disagreed. He has been particularly vocal in his criticism of the upper levels of the church hierarchy for their lack of response to allegations of abuse in the diocese of Cloyne and for the general disconnect between the Holy See and the reality of what was happening on the ground. He has expressed his “anger at the fact that there were in Cloyne - and perhaps elsewhere - individuals who placed their own views above the safeguarding of children, and seemingly without any second thought placed themselves outside and above the regime of safeguarding to which their diocese and the Irish bishops had committed themselves.” He went on to stress the importance of concrete structural reforms which learn from the mistakes made, a refreshing contrast from Pope Benedict’s letter to Irish catholics in 2010 which amounted to little more than a call to prayer.

The Catholic Church is by no means a monolithic organization. The abusers and their coconspirators were a drop in the ocean of the far larger number of clergy, nuns and laity who had an unblemished record and only did positive work. The tragedy is that the bad apples were able to work their way up high enough into the hierarchy to get to a position where they were able to protect and collude with their unscrupulous underlings, burying the tracks of their vile work before moving them on to new hunting grounds full of fresh victims. What makes it worse is that the church's structure makes it difficult to see how such inept leadership can be dislodged. It is not exactly a democracy in which incompetent leaders can be voted out of office.

Divisions within the Catholic church would suggest that the institution will continue to stagnate as long as its leadership in Rome remains oblivious to the mess it has created and as long as the church’s structure continues to operate in its traditional top-down fashion with no systems in place to ensure accountability to the laity.

The church has long prided itself on its ability to resist change, to position itself as a stationary bastion of constant values in a world of changing values. This uncompromising and stubborn value system is moving the church ever further from a position of relevance in a world where values do evolve and change over time whether the church likes it or not.

The days are happily long gone when senior clergy could summon government ministers for an ear-bashing, now it is the other way around and rightly so. This is not a reflection of a change of the type of politicians in office, it is a reflection of the changes in Irish society where politicians no longer need to show reverence to the church to maintain widespread support.

This column has long argued that only secular institutions of government are going to be viable if Ireland is ever to achieve a united independent republic. It would seem that the appetite for the reforms necessary to move in that direction has never been greater.