OPINION: Decline in respect and trust in the Catholic Church has produced a dangerous vacuum.THE CLERICAL sex abuse crisis continues to be a source of grief. Many are angry at the injustice done and they view the church with revulsion. Others grieve from a sense of shame and they too experience a form of revulsion – better known as guilt.
Revulsion is an instinctive reaction to that which humiliates us. We are frozen into self-protective mode and we want to flee or, if that is not possible, to attack and destroy.
This helps short-term survival but, in the long run, it leaves us fixated and unable to adapt.
Certain realities are clear.
First, children were violated by Catholic priests and religious.
Second, this abuse was covered up at leadership level within the church.
Third, the damage done is a long way from being remedied.
People are suspicious and no amount of apologies and new structures will rebuild damaged trust, without some unquestionably personal gesture.
In May 2010 Pope Benedict described the damage being done to the church by the sex abuse
crisis as “truly terrifying”.
He was standing in front of a television camera in the confined space of an aircraft cabin and talking into a microphone. His focus on his own fear, rather than then on the victims, could be seen as self-centred.
But the fact that he was speaking directly from his own vulnerability makes what he said unquestionably personal.
On a flight to Lisbon, in May 2010, he told the world that he was terrified by “the sin inside the church”.
It is one thing to be afraid and to act in a manner dictated by fear. To acknowledge that fear in public, however, is quite different.
Such a gesture only makes sense as the result of a decision to ask for help. This gesture – unprecedented for its public and informal manner – could help us to move beyond revulsion and shame in relation to the Catholic Church.
If there is to be any significant response to this gesture it will have to be by people of global stature who live with the possibility of losing it. They alone would be in a position to convince the Pope that they have a practical insight into the challenge faced, not just by him, but by his office.
There are people in this country who are part of an international network of current and former political office holders.
They bring to that network the experience of a country that has a unique heritage of democratic innovation and whose contribution to the church throughout the world is inextricably bound up with its international standing.
There are good reasons why international political leaders might respectfully and publicly consider the role which the parliamentary process might play in the life of the church.
First, the Pope has acknowledged a deep crisis.
Second, a significant part of the cultural heritage of humanity preserved by the church and indifference to its current difficulties serves no one.
Third, the church is an important advocate for marginalised groups throughout the world.
Fourth, it has played a creditable role in the overthrow of tyranny in parts of the world in recent decades.
These factors could usefully be acknowledged in any dialogue between political leaders and the church.
It would also be timely and fair to reappraise the church-state conflict which marked the emergence of democracy. Neither side has had a monopoly of right or wrong. If each stage in this story was marked by resistance on the part of a dominant and oppressive church, it was also marked by flagrant religious persecution.
Britain’s “glorious revolution” of 1690 gave the world that bedrock of personal liberty – an independent judiciary – but it also led to the exclusion of generations of Catholics from public life. One century later, the French revolution triggered the massacre of Catholics in the Vendée region – an atrocity which one commentator has compared to the killing fields of Cambodia.
Throughout the 19th century anti-clerical regimes in Europe and South America went far beyond a fair dismantling of church privilege to the outright expulsion of religious orders and the exclusion of Catholics from public service.
In the 20th century, the much-romanticised Spanish republicans may themselves have been victims of atrocity, but they did their own share of killing – 7,000 priests and religious and tens of thousands more singled out for being practising Catholics.
Given the vindictive behaviour of their opponents, Catholics had good reason to be suspicious.
Nor were the “democrats” as enlightened as they would have claimed. For a long time parliaments were far from representing everyone. Until the late 19th century, the cherished right to vote was only given to those with property.
This goes a long way to explaining one particularly unpalatable feature of the anti-clerical regimes: when they dismantled church structures, not only did they dismantle the only forms of social welfare and education available, but they did little to replace them.
In spite of all this troubled history, the church and the democratic state have a lot more in common than might appear at first sight. Each depends for its existence on a hierarchically structured self-selecting elite, which is charged with preserving and developing an inherited body of wisdom.
Without the legal profession and independent courts much of what we take for granted in our democratic world – elections, parliament and personal liberty – would not survive.
A democratised church would need a similarly stable hierarchical structure which, of course, it already has.
There is one further and more immediate similarity between church and democratic state.
If the church is going through a time of crisis, so is democracy and, with it, the nation state.
It is in the interests of both and, more importantly, of humanity that they provide an effective counter balance to the emerging global oligarchy.
The three crises referred to in these articles relate to the breakdown of trust between elite groups and the wider population. In the past that trust was generated by a confident facade behind which problems were resolved in secret.
People were happy to live under the imposing shadow of church and state. But the facade is crumbling in Ireland now and throughout the world. This is to no one’s advantage because, without trustworthy institutions, we are all vulnerable.
If trust is to be restored, elite groups will have to learn a new respect for those whom they serve, but no one knows how to achieve this.
It will take time – with moments of misjudgment and setback – but it is in everyone’s interest that we face this challenge together.
Fr Edmond Grace SJ has lectured in law and social ethics at the National College of Ireland and is author of Democracy and Public Happiness.
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