Crisis and Renewal in the Irish Catholic Church - A VOTF perspective (continued)

1 - VOTF
First, our title, Voice of the Faithful - of course we cannot claim to speak on behalf of all of the faithful of Ireland.  VOTF was founded in Boston in 2002, when Boston Catholics suffered the same kind of shock that Dublin Catholics experienced in the wake of the Murphy report.  Its founders were fully committed Catholics who hoped that VOTF would quickly win enough support to bring about new structures in the US church - structures that would allow the whole people of God to raise their voices.  We in VOTF know well that there are many voices in our Irish church at present, for which we cannot claim to speak.

We have about 160 Irish members.  About fifty of those are in continuous online conference on the Internet.  Some are survivors of clerical sexual abuse, representing, in all, six of the twenty-six Irish dioceses.  Those survivors play a prominent role in the leadership of the organization, and have contributed to what I will be saying to you.  Unlike many survivors who have abandoned all contact with the church, our survivor members are seeking a close relationship with a church of the future - a church that has put behind it the culture that gave us the abuse crisis.

Our mission is to provide a prayerful voice through which the faithful can participate in the governance and guidance of the church.  Our goals are, first, to support survivors of clerical abuse; second, to support priests of integrity; and, third, to work for structural changes in the church - changes that will allow us to share responsibility and to communicate more effectively.  

By 'priests of integrity' we mean all those who have served faithfully, especially those priests who have raised their voices on behalf of the abused, and in favor of an accountable leadership in the church.  We have several priests among our members, but they do not fill a leadership role.

VOTF members generally value their church, and see it as having great potential to address all of the major problems facing Irish society - including the wider problem of sexual abuse described in the SAVI report of 2002.  Nothing would please us better than the opportunity to move on from the present crisis.  However, we are dismayed by the inability of current leadership structures in the church to release and harness the full potential of the people of God.  I hope to address some of the reasons for that today.

I am not myself a survivor of abuse.  Instead, in Dublin where I grew up, and at the time of the second Vatican Council, I experienced as a young man great kindness from some of Ireland's outstanding priests - including Austin Flannery O.P. and Fergal O'Connor O.P.  I was a student at UCD, and belonged to a group that took a great interest in the council.  I experienced the church then as a body that taught me to think and gave me a strong sense of my own dignity within it - and I have never forgotten that.  My greatest disappointment has been that the promise of the council was not even half realized in Ireland - but my continuing hope is that it can still bear fruit at this tragic time.

After graduation I became a teacher of history and current affairs in Northern Ireland, teaching for 28 years in Loreto College, Coleraine.    In 1994, when the Brendan Smyth scandal surfaced, I had myself recently experienced a renewal of faith. This had led me to begin writing about the wider crisis of the Irish church.  Retiring from teaching in 1996, I was still writing when the abuse issue surfaced again in 2002.  Noticing the emergence of Voice of the Faithful in the US in that year, I wrote an article about it for the Irish monthly Reality in 2003. 

In the course of writing that article I made contact with some of the leaders of VOTF in Boston.  My hope was that someone in Ireland would see the relevance of the VOTF mission to our Irish situation, and start VOTF here.

That didn't happen.  However, in early 2004 I happened to visit Boston and made the mistake of calling in at the VOTF office.  I was given a list of email addresses of Ireland-based people who had made contact with the organization’s website, and asked to try to form some sort of network when I got home.  I did that, and filled the role of acting coordinator of VOTFI until Easter of this year.

During that time we have taken a number of initiatives in response to the crisis.  Our website tells the whole story of all of that ( www.votfi.com ). Recently four of our members met with four of the bishops, including Bishop Fleming, to discuss the issue of healing and reconciliation.

From the beginning we took the view that the mishandling of the abuse issue was a systemic problem, to do with the clerical and hierarchical culture of the church.  We have said as much in reaction to the various reports.  In 2008 we met with Cardinal Brady to see if we could find common ground, but that went nowhere at the time.

In 2007 we also asked for a meeting with the leadership of the National Conference of Priests of Ireland, to talk about the issue of clericalism.  We saw clericalism as a major factor in all aspects of the abuse issue, and put that to the NCPI executive.  What we heard back from the NCPI was that lay clericalism was also a major part of the problem.  We looked forward to further dialogue over this, and we were greatly dismayed when the NCPI folded up in September 2007.

Clericalism is difficult to define, but it certainly involves an inequality of responsibility and status in the church.  I would describe it as a kind of unspoken contract whereby ordained clergy take leadership responsibility, and lay people defer to that arrangement, too often in a childlike way. 

In March 2007 we drew up a document summarizing our views on the part played by clericalism in the church's abuse crisis.  What follows is taken mostly from that document:

We said we thought clericalism played a role in four different ways

(i) Clericalism as a contributory cause of clerical child sexual abuse
Sexual abuse usually involves an imbalance of power between the perpetrator and the victim.  That imbalance will naturally exist between any adult and a child, but clericalism tilts the balance still further by teaching the child that the priest has unquestionable authority. The priest’s roles as an interpreter of right and wrong, as an agent of divine forgiveness and as a Christ-figure, give an ordained pedophile a unique power to manipulate his Catholic child victim.  This is especially true because of the likelihood that the child’s family will greatly reinforce this idealized image of the priest in the child’s mind.  It is also this image of the priest that makes clerical sexual abuse uniquely damaging to the child’s belief system and spiritual identity.

(ii) Clericalism as a cause of the administrative abuse that has too often followed clerical child sexual abuse
We believe that it was primarily the desire not to ‘scandalize’ laity - i.e. to preserve our idealized image of the priest  - that led to the 'cover up' - the hiding of clerical child sex abuse by too many bishops and the consequent endangerment of other children. It was also the desire to preserve the clerical institution that led bishops to adopt legal advice vis-á-vis victims that often caused further trauma.  Frequently survivors came to be treated as enemies of 'the church'.  The administrative abuse that has so often followed sexual abuse is therefore also inseparable from clericalism.

(iii) Clericalism as a continuing obstacle to child protection
We believe that failure to identify clericalism as a factor in clerical sexual abuse and in administrative abuse, and to eradicate clericalism from the culture of the church, will mean that it will continue to hinder the cause of child protection.  Lay personnel involved in the church’s child protection machinery will need to know that the era of automatic compliance with clergy is over if they are to prioritize the safety of children, and fully realize that they are indeed co-responsible.  There will need to be a shared understanding about this if lay people are not to feel torn between the old culture of compliance and deference, and the new requirements of child safety.  This means that we will together need to surface and recognize the phenomenon of clericalism, and agree to put it behind us. 
We believe that this is why the NBSC has called for structural reform in the church, and we fully support that call.

(iv) Clericalism as an obstacle to healing and reconciliation
Our experience with survivors is that they have totally lost their idealized image of clergy.  They see clericalism as an essential component of their abuser's former power over them, and often see it also operating in their problems in seeking redress from the hierarchy.  For the sake of their own psychological and spiritual health, they cannot ever again resume the childish relationship to clergy that clericalism demands.   They are therefore totally incapable of seeing Christ ever again in a clericalist priest or institution. So, their reconciliation with their church also demands that their church separate itself finally from clericalism.

If clericalism is indeed so deeply entwined with the abuse issue, it follows that we need to surface this and discuss it together.  I frankly acknowledge that a large part of the problem is the expectation of many lay people in Ireland that clergy will continue to play the role of adults in the church, allowing lay people themselves to continue in a childishly dependent and non-responsible role.

I must also acknowledge that many priests are not clericalist in their attitudes.  As I explained at the beginning, I stayed with the church because I was fortunate to meet such priests as a student.  My experience was therefore entirely the opposite of that of a victim of clerical abuse.  I gained from my contact with clergy exactly what victims of abuse so tragically lost - a sense of my own worth and dignity. 

I realize also that since we first drew up that document on clericalism, some progress has probably been made in developing new relationships between priests and people - especially among those involved in the child safeguarding structures.

However, clericalism remains deeply embedded in the structures and culture of the Irish church.  For example, there is still an iron rule that we will all be convened weekly as a church only for worship - and rarely or never for the purpose of discussing the developing crisis and planning the future, or for a new deal as regards the sharing of responsibility.  This alone is a major reason that we have not yet developed in Ireland a significant body of committed lay Catholic intellectuals.  We lay people too often lack even a sense of our own intellectual responsibility to talk to our children about issues of faith.

And that means that the elephants are queuing up, not just in the living room, but in the sanctuary as well - especially the question of how we are to dig ourselves out of the present serious crisis and assure the continuity and future of our faith.
Now, surely, is the time to tackle this problem radically.  We need to meet together, to acknowledge fully the need to put behind us the clericalist culture that has disgraced us, and form a new adult-to-adult relationship in which responsibility is fully shared.