Bear with me here as I do something a little unusual, and perhaps even a slight bit unprofessional: Write about a thing I haven’t even read.
The thing in question is the sermon, yesterday, by the His Grace the Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Farrell. As I write this, an Irish Times headline reports that the Archbishop addressed a “culture of denial” in the Roman Catholic Church about child sex abuse, presumably in response to the recently published scoping enquiry into the allegedly widespread abuse of children in schools run by religious orders.
I have written about that report before and while, as readers of that piece will recall, there is reason I think to be sceptical about some of the cases highlighted within it, there is also little doubt that the overall picture is the depressingly familiar one of people in positions of authority over the vulnerable engaging in a widespread way in the most horrendous kind of criminality.
As such, forgive me if I have little time for or interest in reading another sermon by another Bishop about what we got wrong and how we’re better now.
There are two problems with such sermons: First, that by the time you issue your ninety-seventh apology, or whatever this one is, people are likely to start to believe that you don’t think the first ninety-six apologies were sufficient or sincere.
Second, that not one of the Church’s litany of apologies and introspections has bothered to address the most fundamental question of all: How was it, exactly, that so many paedophiles found their way into religious life?
Farrell’s reported comments – about a “culture of denial” – might seem to go some way to addressing this, but of course they don’t address it at all. “We denied to ourselves that we had a problem” might well be the truth, but it still does not answer the most important question: Why did you have that problem in the first place?
Until that question has been convincingly answered, one can hardly blame the public for suspecting that the Church might still have that problem, or that it might come back with a vengeance.
We should go back, I think, to first principles: Why is Church-based sex abuse so shocking? Why did it so shatter the moral authority of the Irish Church?
The answer, of course, is that it is shocking and fatal to moral authority precisely because the Church positioned itself for decades if not centuries on this island as a guardian and defender of morality, and specifically of sexual morality. Priests were celibate, and therefore morally purer than the rest of us precisely because they did not fall victim to the temptations of the flesh.
Ask somebody almost anything in the world to name one thing about Catholic Priests or Monks that distinguishes them from Jewish Rabbis or Muslim Clerics or Protestant Vicars, and the overwhelming answer will be “celibacy”. It is central to the brand, and central to the very idea of the Catholic Priesthood.
And yet it was this institution, to an overwhelming degree, that was attracting people who not only were not celibate, but were as it turns out some of the most sexually depraved men on the whole island. There are serial adulterers, prostitutes, onlyfans models, and rent boys with an infinitely greater claim to sexual morality and public respect than a person who sexually abuses children.
The Church has never, to my knowledge, provided any answer or introspection on that question. One or two paedophiles attracted by the chance to have power over children might be explainable as the simple reality of bad actors slipping through cracks in the system. Hundreds doing so can only be explained, I think, by the fundamental corruption of that system. It is abidingly and blindingly obvious, I would argue, that such corruption can only have started in Catholic seminaries.
One of the problems, of course, is that this kind of thing raises bigger questions. If one were to say that the problem was in the seminaries, then the obvious follow on from that is that most of the Church’s current leadership, and at this stage a clear majority of its aging priesthood, were also graduates of those same seminaries. There are many Priests in Ireland who, though entirely innocent themselves of any crime, would be revealed to have been trained in Seminaries where the fundamental values of their training had been tainted or corrupted. Were it to – for argument’s sake – transpire that a prominent Irish seminary in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s were openly turning a blind eye, or worse, to paedophiles, then every graduate of that seminary would naturally come under suspicion.
Put it this way: If a major car company discovered that a production line had produced 100 cars out of 1,000 that had faulty brake discs which led to fatal accidents, how comfortable would you be with the idea that your car was one of the remaining 900 and thus perfectly safe? Or might you, perhaps, think that the entire line should be recalled and refunded?
And of course, this is largely how the public now sees the Irish Church. Speeches and Sermons about cultures of denial are not going to change that.
I have written before on these pages that just about the only cure for the Irish Church, at this stage, is for every single Bishop to resign, and for those in Rome who are responsible for such things to dispatch an entirely new brotherhood of bishops to manage the Church in Ireland – people who have never been tainted by association with the Irish seminary system or the corruptions that it produced. Even that would be only a start, but it would be a better start than yet another sermon.