End of Patriarchy? (continued)

Article from the Irish Times by Sean O’Conaill

For that to happen the visitors will need to do something quite sensational and unprecedented. They must announce that the patriarchal governing system of the Catholic church has been finally exposed as anachronistic, stifling and dangerous—and call upon the Pope to reform it.

From birth we Catholics have been enveloped in the myth of apostolic patriarchy. Is there an Irish chapel anywhere that doesn’t contain an icon of St Patrick, complete with a symbol of office that he could never actually have worn? The pointed bishop’s mitre is probably based upon an eleventh century nobleman’s riding helmet (the protruding lappets at the back were originally designed to prevent the wearer’s neck being spattered by mud).  The common misconception that bishops have always worn this headpiece is part of a far larger one: that Jesus of Nazareth somewhere declared that his church should forever be ruled by autocrats, who must concentrate in their own hands all of the most important powers necessary for the administration of the church.

Thus today a Catholic bishop still rules unchecked by the church’s own constitution: canon law. Some authorities say it is not even clear that the pope has the power to dismiss a fellow bishop without the consent of the bishop concerned. This may explain the extraordinary indulgence still granted by the papacy to bishops compromised by failure to protect children.

The papacy’s worst nightmare is not clerical child sexual abuse but schism—a split in the church—and every bishop has the power to initiate a schism in the manner of Archbishop Lefebvre. That power is simply the power of ordination.

”But the church is nevertheless self-regulating,” some will say. ”The apostolic visitation proves it.”

Not so. Every Irish adult who has been paying attention will know that the apostolic visitation to Ireland was triggered by a sequence of events that had nothing to do with the church’s internal constitution. That sequence began in the early 1990s when the crimes of the paedophile Brendan Smyth were reported by some of the families of his victims to the RUC. From then until now the engine of all reform in the handling of this appalling crime by the church has been driven by, first, its victims; second, the secular state; and, third, the secular media. The immediate cause of the apostolic visitation to Ireland was something that former Irish archbishops did their best to prevent: the Irish state inquiry into their maladministration that culminated in the Murphy report. The papacy is decades too late in riding to the rescue of the Irish hierarchy.

It seems certain also that the apostolic visitors will be limited in what they can do by Pope Benedict's own deeply flawed analysis of what went wrong in Ireland. Already disposed to believe that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with the church’s governing system, he seems to have seized upon one section of the Murphy report to explain the failures of bishops—the chapter that declared that in many cases Dublin’s Archbishops and auxiliary bishops had not strictly observed Catholic canon law. This emphasis in the papal pastoral may well lead the visitors to recommend nothing more than strict adherence to canon law as a solution.

What they should (but probably won’t) ask themselves is why it took decades, and an entirely secular process, to reveal that Irish bishops could be in breach even of Catholic canon law.

The answer is obvious. Canon law provides no constantly operating administrative mechanism to discover maladministration by bishops—such as exists in relation to the PSNI in the office of the NI police ombudsman. It is in the undivided power of the bishop that the real source of the disaster lies—but it seems highly unlikely that the apostolic visitors will be given a frame of reference that will allow them to reach this conclusion.

And that means that some kind of collision could be in prospect between the apostolic visitors and the church's child protection agency, the National Board for the Safeguarding of Children. In May the NBSC presented its second annual report, and made through its chairman, John Morgan, a strong appeal. He called for a period of reflection which "should extend to trying to understand and examine what Church structures brought about the situation that has unfolded before us and how such structures must be changed.”

Informed Irish Catholics will not be impressed if the apostolic visitors cannot rise to that challenge. Patriarchy as such no longer impresses us, no matter how strangely it is dressed up. Bitterly disappointed in our own patriarchs of church and state, we now know that the principle of accountability must be applied to all who wield power, by a separation of that power. That administrative principle was discovered almost three centuries ago, and has been successfully applied in the secular sphere. That is precisely why the evil of clerical child sex abuse was eventually uncovered.

A church system that fails to apply that principle to its most powerful patriarchs will fail our children—and so will these visitors if they cannot learn from their church’s bitterest experience.  It is high time for the patriarchs themselves to admit the failure, and recommend the end, of patriarchy. But we mustn’t hold our breath.