Abuse: Only the truth will heal

by Editor · February 24, 2010

It is encouraging that the bishops of Ireland and Pope Benedict have acknowledged the gravity of the Irish Church�s failings in protecting minors from abuses by Church personnel. The Vatican has echoed what the present Irish episcopate has publicly accepted: �This grave crisis has led to a breakdown in trust in the Church�s leadership and has damaged her witness to the Gospel and its moral teaching.�

Pope Benedict has been clear about his anguish over the abuse of minors. He made it a point of meeting with survivors of sexual abuse on his visits to the United States and Australia. There is no reason to doubt the sincerity of the pope�s regret at what many young people suffered at the hands of Church personnel. There may well be a benefit to adding a meeting with abuse survivors from Ireland and elsewhere to his British tour in September.

The pope is preparing a pastoral letter addressed to the Church in Ireland (no specific date for release had been announced at the time of writing). It must be hoped that this letter will show an even more comprehensive understanding of the people�s outrage than the Vatican statements have.

That outrage is not likely to be diminished by reports that the apostolic nuncio to Ireland is invoking diplomatic precepts to avoid appearing before an Irish parliamentary committee, or by the Holy See�s reluctance to accept the resignation of three bishops named in the Murphy Report, which detailed the mishandling of abuse cases in the archdiocese of Dublin.

The people � and not only in Ireland � are naturally angry at those who committed abuses. It is an anger directed at individuals, with an understanding that paedophiles and pederasts can be found in any institution in which adults and adolescents have contact.

However, the public�s loss of confidence in the Church and utter disgust concerns those who facilitated these abuses by their silence and, in some cases, by the deliberate suppression of the truth. One cannot reduce this to mere �errors of judgment and omissions�, as the Vatican did in the statement following the meeting with the Irish bishops.

It is not enough to attribute the scandal to individual bumbling. The cover-ups were tied to a corrupting culture in the Church which those bishops who covered up and suppressed the truth helped to perpetuate.

More than abusive priests, and more even than bishops and other Church leaders failing their Church, it is that culture of silence, secrecy, clerical privilege and vanity which is on trial in the public court. Pope Benedict�s pastoral letter will not be seen as being of much comfort, never mind a step towards reconciliation, unless it candidly identifies this to be at the heart of the crisis, as Bishop Joseph Duffy of Clogher did after the Vatican meeting.

The Church will need to address the double standards which allowed for the concealment of grave sins by clergy while the very people who covered these sins up were pronouncing on Catholic moral teachings. The Church will need to reconcile the hypocrisy of certain Catholics being barred from the Lord�s Table while known sexual abusers were allowed to preside over it.

Moreover, it is necessary for the Vatican to state exactly how much it knew about the incidence of abuse worldwide, and admit its failings (if any) in dealing with such scandals � painful and humiliating as this may be.

As the pope said, �the problems of the past� must be addressed �with determination and resolve�. The repudiation of sexual abuse and its cover-up must therefore be forthright and complete, so that full healing can follow.