Rarely has the Catholic Church in Ireland and some of its bishops come so close to incurring the odium of the people, writes Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent
It has been a bad week - a very bad week - for the Catholic Church in Ireland and in particular for some of its bishops. Rarely have they come so close to incurring the odium of the people.
Meanwhile, a new type of hero has arrived - the violated child become adult. And, as with all real heroes, they have endured great suffering through no fault of their own, triumphed over it, and now come to call to account their oppressors and those who collaborated with them. For the first time, they are being heard.
The Catholic Church in Ireland was once seen as heroic. It too came through great suffering, triumphed over it, and successfully called its oppressors, and those who collaborated with them, to account.
Up to as late as the 1970s it enjoyed "the sort of power which Roman canonists could only dream about. Its word was law and its authority was often exercised in a way that was bigoted, puritanical and philistine", as theologian Father Gabriel Daly put it to a meeting of the Conference of the Religious of Ireland (CORI) in 1997.
When you are on top so long a certain divine arrogance can creep in. "Pride", they called the quality in Lucifer. It becomes endemic. An omerta culture grows up, with its code of silence - or "code of confidentiality" - which over-rides all else, in the interests of the "brotherhood". There is an inevitability in the decline and fall that follows.
One of the very valuable lessons of human history is that when an institution loses touch with its moral base it begins to decline. And, as history illustrates, that applies to all human institutions, even those divinely inspired. And the church has been down this road before.
Jesus was very clear on children. When his disciples tried to stop people bringing their children to touch him, he got annoyed and ordered that the children not be stopped. "For the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these," he said. And he took the children in his arms.
He was equally clear on those who gave scandal. A millstone was to be tied around their necks and they were to be thrown into the depths of the sea. (It is understood he was speaking metaphorically.)
No "code of confidentiality there". No advice to a once violated child that, where justice for him or her was concerned, the moral must take a back seat to the legal. To "the code".
OR that following years of newspaper articles, a book and a television documentary one could not know enough, or tried to find out enough about a situation to make the kind of judgment others seemed to be able to make.
And then they say the decline in vocations is because of consumer- ism/secularism/materialism/ hedo- nism, a drop in family values, the fall-off in regular prayer at home, dropping Mass attendance - a dreadful, God-less, decadent world full of "pan-sexuality and libertinage", as Cardinal Hoyos of the Vatican's Congregation for the Clergy said recently. Blaming the world is all very well, but it has to be difficult to see it clearly with such a log in your eye.
In his address to CORI Father Gabriel Daly continued that the Catholic Church in Ireland had undergone what he termed "institutional disrepute". And that was then.
"We belong to a church which as an institution rarely if ever admits to having been wrong or to having inflicted harm on people," he said. Reform in the church was "normally by amnesia", he said. This is an institution after all which took until 1992 to pardon Gallileo (for being right!), 350 years after his death.
THE causes of this "disrepute" here in Ireland need hardly be repeated. They go back indeed to the frequently bigoted arrogance of old, but have come to a head this past decade, since 1992, when Bishop Eamon Casey was exiled for the great crime of having a son.
No such exile has been the fate of any of the too numerous clergy convicted of child abuse since, except on a temporary basis, as with Father Brendan Smyth. He was sent to Scotland and the US, as well as throughout most of Ireland, as the church's way of dealing with his rampant paedophilia.
And there was Father Michael Cleary, purveyor of rigid sexual morals in broadcasting and print, who then returned to his companion's bed, with whom he had two sons. She had come to him for help as a vulnerable young woman.
And so, so many other hypocricies practised by those preaching otherwise. It has had predictable consequences.
Just 30 young men went for the priesthood in Ireland last year, compared to 164 in 1970. There was (and will be) just one ordination in the Dublin archdiocese this year, out of 1.1 million Catholics in the largest diocese in Ireland. And this is not because of a decadent youth.