To the BOTTOM of the SEE

Today in Catholic churches throughout Ireland, extracts have been read out from a Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father. The letter, an unprecedented document, addresses the entire Catholic communion in Ireland, both severally and as an entity, on the matter of child abuse. That Ratzinger set himself to make this gesture will have cost him dear, I have no doubt. He will also have hoped to draw a definitive line under the matter, at least insofar as it pertains to Ireland, both the North and the Republic. As he knows, however, there is no Catholic mission anywhere in the world that is untouched by these revelations.

The letter has already been minutely examined for text and subtext, for omission and spin, for hostage to fortune and refinement of doctrine. One phrase will certainly resound long after the dregs of today’s communion wine have dried on the chalice: “these sinful and criminal acts”. That begs the question as to whether the church will instigate criminal proceedings. Later, Ratzo advises the bishops to “continue to cooperate with the civil authorities in their area of competence”, a form of words that suggests there is a limit to how welcome will be forthcoming visits by the Gardaí and the Police Service of Northern Ireland.


Wanted for Questioning

Most speculation will attach, no doubt, to the sequence of events, to how much the pontiff knew and how soon. Ratzinger has clearly been tainted by the intelligence that his elder brother Georg is implicated in the revelations about abuse of boy members of the celebrated choir of Regensburg Cathedral School. In a ritual response that has been weakened through overuse by the big cheeses of the church, Georg says he knew nothing of the abuse, indeed that he was “secretly relieved” when physical punishment was formally abandoned at the school thirty years ago. Perhaps he would have been better advised not to keep it secret. Georg Ratzinger was music director and chorus master for thirty years. It is unimaginable that any supposed disciplinary regime was administered without his knowledge.


Georg and Joe Ratzinger

Little brother Joe Ratzinger (Pope Benedict) says in his letter “I have been deeply disturbed by the information which has come to light” and you do fall to wondering to which light he refers, whether it is the light of his own knowledge or the more tiresome light of public scrutiny. Does he pass his own test, as articulated at the close of his remarks addressed to his “brother bishops”: “only decisive action carried out with complete honesty and transparency will restore the respect and good will of the Irish people towards the Church”? Is the Catholic community and the wider world getting “complete honesty and transparency” from Ratzinger?


Ad by Survivors Network of People Abused by Priests in Oregon

I ask because, elsewhere in the letter, he suggests that the Irish people only have themselves to blame: “In recent decades … the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society”. Well, we know what he’s getting at here. He means that sexual abuse is an invention of those bastard Proddies and infidels whose baleful influence has tainted the weaker bethren in the holy church. If only the Catholics had remained the most powerful force in Irish society, none of these little local difficulties would have arisen (or rather, more honestly, come to light).

And we begin to see how weak is Ratzo’s grasp of the essentials in this matter – or perhaps how very far from being candid he really is. Consider the ingredients in this mess to which Ratzo does not care to allude. It’s evident that he piles the blame on rogue priests, whom he refers to more than once as “our confreres”. That’s because he is only willing to acknowledge one kind of abuse, the one from which he can most easily recoil and which he can most easily castigate: sexual abuse.

But there are differing kinds and degrees of abuse that have traumatised and damaged countless children who have had the misfortune to fall into the clutches of the Catholic Church. There is sexual abuse, there is physical abuse (slappings, floggings, imposition of fasting, even degrees of torture) and there is mental and psychological abuse (threats, guilt trips, the hellfire and damnation promised to any who have the gall to ask a question). And in these orders of abuse, all orders of Catholic hierarchy are implicated: patriarchs, archbishops, cardinals, primates, metropolitans, diocesan bishops, apostolics, ordinaries, priests, deacons, pastors and vicars, not to forget abbots, seminarians, teachers in Catholic schools and indeed nuns: the Irish nun, after all, is the proverbial figure of a harridan or harpy.

The point here is that abuse of every kind is founded in a single appetite, the appetite for power. Abusers do it because they can. Their age and/or size and/or authority and/or the hierarchy that sustains them legitimises that abuse somewhere in their warped understanding. That is how abuse becomes institutionalised, almost a tradition, a convention of the institution. There has clearly been a culture of cruelty in the Roman church. That is what Ratzinger can never acknowledge because, as he must see, it strikes at the very core of his community’s belief.


"Anti-gay but sex abuse ok": US newspaper cartoon

Religions – all religions – depend upon a concept that the Roman church uniquely makes explicit, that of infallibility. That the tenets, the doctrine, the texts, the tradition of an organisation are inviolable hands extraordinary power to those who administer that organisation. That power renders their word law. It also implicitly endorses their every action, whatever misgiving may be felt by anyone who perforce must embark upon any query saddled with the crucial disadvantage of expressing apostasy. What hope is there then for the most junior of adherents, a child?

It is the abuse of power over others that expresses itself in all kinds of assault upon the powerless, whether of a choirboy by a sacristan or of a daughter by her father or of an army recruit by a sergeant instructor or of a starlet by a movie producer. “Power” Henry Kissinger observed rather gleefully “is a great aphrodisiac” but Dr K was thinking of consensual sex, not of rape. That power goes to both the head and the genitals is no great revelation in the modern world.


Protest at installation of Bishop of Providence, Rhode Island

Unfortunately for Pope Benedict and other leaders of the deluded, religion doesn’t work if you run it like a democracy or a liberal college or a hippie commune. It is intrinsic to belief that it doesn’t do doubt. That is why I set my face against the establishment of examples of that most contradictory of institutions, the “faith school”. No enterprise, however enlightened and fleet-footed, can bridge the gulf between the two opposed elements in this notion. A school is a home of education, which is a process whereby pupils have their eyes opened, their minds expanded and their well of knowledge deepened. A good teacher takes her pupils to the top of the mountain to point out, laid out below them, all the riches of the land. Faith is a single concept, a check box of answers to questions that the pupils are not encouraged to ask, a process of learning texts by heart and parroting ancient, unexamined responses to a changing world.


John Kelly, US coordinator of Survivors of Child Abuse, with part of his commission's five-volume report

It is the desperate fear that this on-going scandal will fatally erode the Catholic hegemony that unmistakeably peeps through the Pope’s encyclical. To the victims of abuse, he says “I ask you not to lose hope. It is in the communion of the Church that we encounter the person of Jesus Christ”. Well, if you cleave to supernatural delusions you can satisfy them all by yourself, without the mediation of an organisation. Ratzo of course is mindful that many will leave the church without losing the faith and he wants to stem the tide. It’s an unfortunate way of putting it, though. What those victims are most likely to remember is that it was in the communion of the Church that they encountered the person of the devil, the serpent, the Herod, the Pilate, the Judas and the man who passed by on the other side.

One who evidently passed by on the other side big time is now the Primate of All Ireland. As a priest in 1975, Seán Brady was party to the covering up of abuse of boys by the late Father Brendan Smyth, now considered the most prolific known abuser of children in modern Catholic history. One of the boys obliged by Brady and others to sign oaths not to reveal the abuse is suing Brady for compensation. The Cardinal has so far resisted the pressure on him to step down. It fell to him this weekend to read from the letter to his flock at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh. The Pope said of the victims, “you have suffered grievously and I am truly sorry”. Brady read it out as “grieviously”. If he’s a functional illiterate, he certainly shouldn’t be the Primate of All Ireland.


Cardinal Seán Brady

This letter will not be the last of it. Anger in North and South America and Australasia has now been bolstered in Germany, where Chancellor Merkel actually spoke out in the matter. The doughty campaigners in the States, where the Tea Party and other radical movements have fired up civil disobedience among hitherto law-abiding Republican ranks, number among them many Catholics. The Catholic Church across the States has grown used to placards and shouting whenever it steps a stately toe onto the street. Ratzo has his work cut out. In his letter, he cites “one of the contributing factors” to the present unrest as “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal”. But while the likes of Cardinal Brady remain in denial and cannot bring themselves to take responsibility for their own actions and while Benedict himself does not insist on resignations and retribution and an end to all granting of sanctuary to abusers, this boil is not going to get lanced.

Amusingly, the clearest and fullest version of the Pope’s letter I have found is on the Aljazeera in English site. Here is the link:

english.aljazeera.net/.webloc