Responding to lies

Speaking to a Spanish newspaper this month, Pope Francis said that he gets a slight case of existential hives when I see that everybody has it in for the Church and Pius XII.

 

He was, of course, referring to the unjust  and untrue  accusation that Pope Pius XII maintained a silence about the Holocaust because of some form of anti-semitism.

The myth of Pius XIIs complicity in the Holocaust is regularly used as a stick with which to beat the Church.

The full truth about Pope Pius wartime record will be revealed when the Vatican archives are made public and subjected to due analysis. In the interim there is enough evidence to show that Pius was involved in aiding the Jews of Rome during the citys occupation by Nazi Germany and that he did in fact speak up at least once against the Holocaust, in his Christmas broadcast of 1942.

Yet the calumny of Pius as Hitlers Pope, as one slanderous book title proposed, has taken a hold so firm that even evidence to the contrary cannot shake it.

Calumny has a way of doing that. Once a misleading idea is planted, it is difficult to correct false perceptions.

So it was with the recent global media frenzy which alleged that members of the Sisters of Bon Secours had dumped the bodies of almost 800 babies into a septic tank at the St Marys home for unwed mothers in Tuam, County Galway, between 1925 and 1961.

The obvious implication in these reports was that the nuns, and the Irish Catholic Church which commissioned them to run the home, were quite monstrous.

Slowly it emerged that the septic tank story was untrue, and that the infants had been given relatively respectful burials (though one may argue about whether the burial grounds were sufficiently dignified).

The researcher into the Tuam home, Catherine Corless, far from being delighted at the wide publicity her work was receiving, stated her dismay at the way the media had distorted the story.

The conversation then turned to the numbers of fatalities of infants under the care of the Bon Secours sisters.

The number of almost 800 dead infants sounded so alarming that the archbishop of Dublin and the Bon Secours sisters welcomed a public inquiry, though this portion of the Churchs response received little play in the media.

It turned out that the rate of infant mortality at the Tuam home was very much in line with that of other homes of the kind.

So what in its essence was a story about unmarked graves became a grotesque tale of ghoulish, neglectful nuns throwing dead babies into a septic tank. And it is this false image which will remain in the publics perception.

The Catholic Church in Ireland and elsewhere has a fundamental image problem when even intelligent people accept as plausible reports as bizarre as nuns dumping dead babies into septic tanks. It seems clear that many reasonable people are prepared to believe the worst of the Church.

The Irish Church has itself to blame for much of the anti-Catholicism it now faces. The scandal of the cover-up of sexual abuse and other clerical abuses, especially in Ireland, has fed such mindsets. All the wonderful work of priests and religious in Ireland over the centuries notwithstanding, the anger of many people remains.

Obviously distorted stories such as that of the nuns in Tuam feed this anger and anti-Catholic sentiments.

Moreover, secularists and other opponents of the Church will freely use calumny to suppress all attempts by the Church, especially in Ireland, to redefine itself within society and to exclude the Church from public discourse.

Catholics must not be intimidated by this, neither in Ireland nor anywhere else. We must rise above the calumnies and character assassinations, the ridicule and odium. And we must treat with compassion those who have been hurt by the scandals of the Churchs own making.

We must continue to present the Church and its Gospel values in society, and demand a voice in public discourse, always with humility but also with conviction.

And in the same spirit we must answer the Churchs critics, even those who perpetuate untruths, with patience and respect.

We probably will not change their minds, but we might reach those who are listening.