News from Ireland
Elephants in the Sanctuary
by Sean O'Conaill
VOTF Ireland, President (continued)
Exposing those who read it in any detail to some of the most appalling images of cruelty in the annals of Ireland, the Ryan report was a traumatic event for the rest of the nation also. Especially for us Catholics who lived within a grand illusion, denied knowledge of the total scale of that trauma by decades of still unexplained ecclesiastical not-knowing. Who can lift a Rosary now without thinking of small fingers bleeding in Goldenbridge orphanage in Dublin?
Denied always the opportunity to discuss as adults within our own church any deeply controversial issue, this denial persists in the aftermath of the report. Given no leadership signal to initiate such a discussion, Irish Catholic priests these days must negotiate every Sunday the elephants who now occupy the sanctuary - the unavoidable questions raised by our unbidden flashbacks to Letterfrack and Daingean and Artane. And by the knowledge that such things were happening at the apogee of the church's power in Ireland - 1979 - when a pope visited us for the first time.
How could this have happened? How could our bishops not have known of it, when the very word 'bishop' - is derived from the Latin word 'episcopus' - overseer? Why did it take an inquiry instituted not by the church but by the Irish state to reveal it? Why was the basic Christian principle of the equality of all in the sight of God - expressed for example by the papal encyclical Pacem in Terris of 1963 - terra incognita in dozens of Catholic institutions in Ireland for decades after that encyclical, where children needed care?
As the church's supreme teachers, did Ireland's bishops never check if basic Catholic social teaching was actually observed in child-caring Catholic institutions in their own dioceses? Did they never hear any rumours or share any misgivings, or think to institute an inquiry of their own?
If not, why do they think the church's governing system is fit for purpose? Why do they think their own symbol of office, the crosier, the shepherd's crook, would not raise an elephant question now as we read Jeremiah's prophesy of 'doom for the shepherds who allow the flock of my pasture to be destroyed and scattered'? Do they suppose that, having read that passage recently, we can pass the Sunday collection plate as usual, without wondering why on earth we are doing it?
It is our own customary silent assent to whatever happens in the church that we must now question most of all. Was that not precisely the habit that prevented paid officials in Ireland's Education ministry from properly inspecting the institutions, and from giving those children the protection of the state? Was not their negligent deference to clergy and religious sinful in those circumstances? When will we hear a homily about that?
And what is the dignity of the lay Catholic in the church anyway, that we have never had the right to raise such questions, as a community of faith, with men who can still expect our children to be lined up as a guard of honour when they visit our schools? Isn't that the status of the medieval peasant, the serf? Isn't that what we are after all - Irish Catholic serfs - paying a bondsman's toll every Sunday to be treated this way?
A serf can only give the nod to whatever happens. Isn't that a reason that generations of Irish Catholics have felt powerless to act simply out of Christian love? Our hearts too have been held prisoner by a system that taught us that only the bishop could inform our consciences - while the same bishops maintained a cloak of secrecy over all that was wrong.
Is there a way of being an Irish Catholic without also being a serf? If so, how are we to discover it this way - by behaving every Sunday as though nothing had happened? Isn't that too sinful - a shutting of the eyes to abusive negligence, and to the slow unnecessary dying of our church?
These are just some of the questions that beg hopelessly for answers in the Catholic sanctuary in Ireland these days, rampant elephants ushered in and left to roll around in it by a church system that totally failed thousands of Irish children.
It failed them essentially because its office holders behaved then as they are still doing - as absolute monarchs who must never allow themselves to be questioned by their own people.
