When you put Archbishop Martin’s speech to abuse victims last Sunday week through Wordle.net it produces a ‘word cloud’, essentially a jumbled mix of words with the most used words larger than the rest.
The most used words by Archbishop Martin were ‘forgiveness’, ‘silence’, ‘Jesus’, ‘abandonment’ followed by ‘courage’, ‘truth’, ‘survivors’ ‘Dublin’.
Wordle.net says it all and the Ballyfermot archbishop played a ‘blinder’ last Sunday week.
The pictures of Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston who is the Pope’s investigator for Dublin in the simple habit of a Capuchin friar, and Archbishop Martin in a simple black cassock without any trimmings to designate his office, both lying prostrate in front of hundreds of victims and their families is an image that needs to be seen the world over.
For all his time at the UN and travelling internationally to speak at conferences, the handling of abuse in Dublin is Archbishop Martin’s legacy to the modern Church.
This is his issue and he is literally brilliant at it, and while he might say that he is only doing what any good Christian with an ounce of compassion would do in his place, bishops all over the world have failed where he has succeeded.
Yet the Irish Church is moving on, slowly, from the abuse saga which has dogged it for 15 years. It may be that Archbishop Martin will move on to.
The Vatican might be afraid to move the archbishop because it could be interpreted that he was being removed for his courageous efforts to speak out for victims.
Yet those in the know, know there are problems in Dublin.
There is a mountain of change needed and it is increasingly clear that the archbishop may not be the man to handle this change.
He has admitted as much: “I would have to say that despite all my efforts I am failing in my attempts to lead such change...change management has to have the patience and the strategy to bring everyone along with it and that may not be my talent.”
And yet a question poses itself despite the obvious humility of the archbishop to recognise the areas in which he is not strong, namely that there are many laity in Dublin who are gifted strategy people, with careers in management and human resource management, there are people with the patience of Job who would gladly lend their skills, people who are not asked can’t give their time and skill.
If you put that last statement of the Archbishop through Wordle.net it would highlight ‘I’ and ‘my’. This is the flaw in the archbishops management vision; he thinks it all has to come from him, the Archbishop.
A good leader knows when to lead and how to delegate; he also knows his weaknesses and gathers people around him who make up for those weaknesses.
Perhaps Archbishop Martin would be well advised to have a shuffle of his inner-circle and get in some good advisers and talented assistants.
As Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech called The Man in the Arena: “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
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