Comment: The response of the Catholic hierarchies internationally to clerical sex abuse has shown no compassion for the victims, writes Father Tom Doyle.
Bishop Brendan Comiskey did what no other bishop has done since the sex abuse scandals hit the Catholic Church.
Bishops in the US have been forced to resign but their departure was camouflaged to save face. Bishop Comiskey openly admitted that he quit because his best wasn't good enough. It wasn't! There are hundreds of people in Ireland, especially the victims of the unspeakable sexual abuse, who will attest to his failure.
Now the question is whether or not his resignation will help or hinder the steady march towards justice and hierarchical accountability. If the Irish bishops think that this single act will solve the problem and stem the rising tide of furious Catholics demanding straight answers to hard questions, they are dead wrong.
If there is a positive message from the resignation it is that what is most important is not defending and protecting the bishops at all costs, in spite of their gross negligence, but justice for the victims and honesty for the entire church.
The message is that the Catholic Church is about the people, not just the bishops. They are but a tiny percentage of the vast Catholic community. Ferns, like every other diocese in the world, is a community of believers centred around Christ. It is not the personal kingdom of the bishop. He is accountable to the community and not vice versa. That's the positive message.
On the negative side it must be made crystal clear that resignation does not solve the problem. The Catholic Hierarchy should not delude themselves into thinking that Bishop Comiskey has been a sacrificial lamb, that justice is accomplished and now it's back to business as usual on Monday.
In Ireland and in the US, Catholic prelates have been publicly expressing their pain, their feelings of vulnerability, their shock at the spectacle of sex abusers in their midst. Priests express their embarrassment at appearing in public dressed in clerical garb. The Pope is "personally and profoundly" afflicted and worries that the acts of the abusers will taint all men of the cloth.
The truth is that most people couldn't care less about the pain and embarrassment of the priests and bishops. The pain is a signal that something is wrong and that wrong can't be sandpapered away by emotional expressions of personal hurt or self-righteous expressions of rage at the abusers.
It is precisely this clerical narcissism that produced the crisis in the first place. The root cause must be exposed. If it takes the conviction of a bishop or two or three for criminal negligence, or a government inquiry, then so be it.
Resignations won't solve the problem because the bishops must be held accountable to the victims and to the Catholic population as a whole. For years there were no apologies, no resignations, no expressions of shock and outrage. There were only cover-ups, midnight transfers, denial and lies. There was no compassion for victims but plenty of blame-shifting and corporate denial. Why?
So far the steps taken by bishops here and there don't indicate much, if any, awareness of the root causes of the problem. Individual bishops have created policies and procedures, declared zero tolerance, issued public apologies, raged against clergy sex abusers and they may as well have saved their time and energy because it's all too little too late. The policies haven't been followed in the past, yet the depth and breadth of the problem has been clearly known for over a decade.
Some say that the Catholic Church always moves slowly. That's fine for arcane theological discussions but not when the lives of children are at stake. What is needed to begin with is a commitment to the idea that church leadership really is accountable to the people, followed by an honest admission that it's not just about clergy sex abusers or the obvious failure of celibacy.
It's really about the obsession with ecclesiastical power and the perverted value system that attempts to explain away anything, even child abuse, to keep that power. Somewhere there has been a major disconnect between the theological reality of the church as community and the bishops as shepherds and the distorted aberration of the church as corporation and the bishops as chief executive officers.
Several days ago Cardinal Castrillon, in comments about the Pope's remarks in his annual Holy Thursday Letter to Priests, said "the church has never neglected the problem of sex abuse, even before it ended up on the front pages of international papers."
He's right that the church hasn't neglected the problem but wrong in expecting us to believe that it was his church that has been taking care of the problem. The hierarchical church, the cardinal's church, has convinced us of its cold indifference and lack of compassion that has often crossed the line into disdain for the victims.
The makeshift, defensive measures won't work. A radical remaking of the role and authority of the clergy in the life of the church and society might.
Father Tom Doyle is a US Dominican priest and canon lawyer who has been a long-time advocate and ally of clergy abuse victims. He is serving as a US army chaplain in Germany.