Catholic and Loving it!

You would need to have been living under a rock these last few weeks not to have seen the news about the Ryan Commission Report which has recently come out about about child abuse in Catholic Ireland. If like me, you prefer to skip the newspaper headlines and find out what the report actually says you can read it online here. Be warned though, it makes for grim reading. To quote Ruth Gledhill, "prepare to be very, very angry"

The catalogue of crimes is horrific, with the rape of young boys and girls described as "endemic" and levels of violence usually associated with concentration camps such as children dragged out of bed in the night, stripped naked and beaten by sadistic nuns and brothers. It would be bad enough if these were isolated incidents but this is just the latest after years of revelations of priests abusing children and vulnerable adults. The Catholic Church has a serious problem that demands an explanation.

For a while now the standard Catholic response has been this: That the Church is infallible but her members are not and in any organisation this large there are bound to be a few bad eggs. Usually this is backed up with a few examples of abuse by school teachers, step fathers and police officers to demonstrate that it is not only the Catholic Church that has problems. Finally, for good measure, it is pointed out that the Church in the UK has implemented thorough child protection measures to make sure that this sort of thing never happens again.

That response might have worked, it were really true that the abusers worked alone in secret and were immediately dealt with as soon as their actions came to light.

If only that were true...

As everybody surely knows by now, perpetrators of abuse were not dealt with as soon as their actions came to light, not even close. In many places they were shuffled from one parish to another by Bishops who moved priests away from parishes where they faced accusation to parishes where they were entirely unknown and free to abuse again. When I say "Bishops" I don't mean one or two isolated incidents in one country, I mean a significant number of Bishops across the world. Bishops didn't work alone in this either, secretaries wrote letters, episcopal vicars oversaw appointments. Quite a few people on the inside knew what was going on. Most of those people did nothing.

The Ryan Commission Report reveals once again that in Catholic Institutions abuse has been known about and concealed at all levels...

Awareness of the abuse of children in schools and institutions was believed to exist within society at both official and unofficial levels. Professionals, including Government Inspectors, medical practitioners, and teachers had a role in relation to various aspects of children’s welfare while they were in schools and institutions. Local people were employed in most of the residential facilities as professional, care and ancillary staff. In addition, members of the public had contact with children in out-of-home care in the course of providing services to the institutions both at a formal and informal level.

[Ryan Commission Report - Vol 3, Chapter 19]

Why would people at all levels conspire to cover up the actions of abusers in Catholic institutions? There is only one answer: We are not dealing with a small minority, with a few bad eggs. We are dealing with a cultural phenomenon.

I don't think it would be fair to talk about a "culture of abuse", because I'm quite sure the majority of Catholics are not in favour of abuse and do not encourage or perpetrate abuse. What we are talking about is a culture which is favourable to abuse. It's like storing raw meat in a warm place. Warmth itself is not food poisoning, but it is better to keep food in the fridge.

On the 29th May (the week the Ryan Report was released) the Catholic Herald carried the following leading article...

We are all tainted: every good Catholic, every good priest, every good bishop, every good pope is sullied by what was done or tolerated by the Catholic Church.

[...]

We are not talking about an aberration by a handful of wicked people acting in defiance of the Church. Sadly, we are talking about a deep cleft in the ranks of the Church itself.

The report exposes a culture which hides behind a clericalism which is prepared to protect vicious behaviour at the expense of defenceless innocents, many of whom carry their scars throughout life.

[link]

Remember those words: "a culture which hides behind a clericalism which is prepared to protect vicious behaviour at the expense of defenceless innocents, many of whom carry their scars throughout life". That's not the ramblings of a "fundamentalist blogger", that's the view of a mainstream Catholic newspaper.

There is a tendency when talking about abuse by Catholic priests to use the past tense. Abuse happened and it was bad and Bishops used to shuffle priests around. The implied claim is that abuse has been relegated to the past and the Church was very different then and besides which we now have "Safeguarding" in place to make sure that in future those committing abuse are prevented from re-offending.

But has anything really changed? I'm not so sure.

Looking at the definition of "abuse" we find that the word essentially means "misuse". That's why there are so many kinds of abuse such as verbal abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, substance abuse and so on. We call it abuse when somebody misuses a person sexually but we also use the word in other ways, like "I let my daughter have access to the biscuit jar but she abused the privilege".

Clearly, the crimes are different. I am most definitely not suggesting that a little girl who steals biscuits commits the same crime as a grown man who rapes little girls. That would be ludicrous. I am simply observing that we use the same word for both instances because fundamentally we recognise that the same phenomena is at work: All abuse is essentially a misuse of power.

In the case of the Church, what we are dealing with a misuse of the power of those in a position of authority.

From bitter personal experience I can tell you with certainty that this abuse of clerical power does not belong in the past tense. It belongs firmly in the present tense because it happens today with alarming regularity. It happens whenever a bishop or a priest takes it upon himself to use his clerical status as a magic ring that grants him the power to act with impunity.

So yes, that includes priests who rape children but it also includes priests that misuse their power in other ways. Priests who decide at their own whim to mislead people about the teaching of the Church or to commit acts of "liturgical abuse" such as modifying prayers to suit their own political agenda.

Once again, I am most definitely not suggesting that the priest who rapes a child commits the same crime as the priest who "merely" lies to one. What I am saying is this: Both men are abusing clerical power. Both men are protected by the same culture that protects and encourages priests who abuse their position of authority.

As far as I can see, the position of the Bishops Conference of England and Wales including our own Bishop Terrence Drainey is currently "let us have a culture that tolerates and even encourages clerical abuse, in which priests and bishops are free to abuse their power and authority and laypeople are expected to be co-conspirators or else face accusations of disrespect and disloyalty but let us make an exception for the sort of abuse that the civil authorities take seriously, that is, the sort of abuse that costs money and looks bad in the papers".

This is like saying "stealing is okay, as long as you don't steal anything somebody will notice" or "lying is okay, as long as nobody finds out". Essentially, the Bishops are saying "it's okay with us if priests abuse their power, as long as they don't do anything illegal".

What concerns me most of all is this: As long as the culture remains in place, the potential for harm continues. As long as the culture remains in place, the potential for "[hiding] behind a clericalism which is prepared to protect vicious behaviour at the expense of defenceless innocents" remains in place.

This is simply unacceptable.