THE CLERICAL child sex abuse scandal “robs us all of our innocence,” Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor has said in an address to Irish priests.
“It does not matter that the great majority of priests and bishops were good servants and pastors of their people. When the scandal of abuse runs so deep, it casts its shadow over everything.”
Former Catholic primate of England and Wales, and Archbishop Emeritus of Westminster, the cardinal was speaking to Catholic priests at Maynooth yesterday in an address to mark the end of the Year of Priests. Last month it was announced that he will lead an apostolic visitation to the archdiocese of Armagh in the autumn.
It was not just the public dimension to the scandal, “painful though it is, that can and must be faced. It is, rather, the more personal side of it. It is the way in which we can all feel that our own ministry is somehow contaminated,” he said.
Reflecting “on how these terrible crimes have affected the church”, he said “there can be a sense of suddenly being exposed and naked, all too conscious of our inadequacies, and acutely aware that maybe we have lost part of our moral and spiritual authority”.
The things he remembered “about my life as a priest are not the successes but rather the failures and one particular and painful failure occurred 10 years ago when, owing to my grave mishandling of a priest who was an abuser, I was attacked and vilified for nearly two years.”
He continued: “You probably know the story. How well I remember the feelings of failure and isolation and shame, not so much for myself but for my family, my diocese, for the Catholic people of England and Wales who, to a certain extent, felt the shame of my own failure and of child abuse in general.”
He said he “began to understand in a new way, by talking with victims, the pain and grave damage done to them. I say this to show, I suppose, that I myself am not free from blame but have had to learn from mistakes to become, as someone described it, ‘a wounded healer’.”
What is clear, he said was “that we cannot go back, nor can we simply repeat the formulas of the past”. As in England and Wales, “we need honest appraisal of where our structures and procedures failed, not just legally and canonically but humanly. Then we need to waste no time to get new and more effective ones in place.”
It was “a time for lament, a really honest acknowledgement of what has been done and what has been lost.” Such “an act of truth . . . turns us again to the source of our life and faith; it opens us to God.”