Tolerance only of those with whom you agree is no tolerance at all

There are things that are intolerable. A small boy cycling home, too much in pain to sit on a saddle, and then desperately trying to wash his bloodstained underpants so his parents will not discover that he was abused by a religious brother. That is an intolerable evil. There is no question of anything except zero tolerance.

We owe gratitude for the courage of the men now in their 50s and 60s who are willing to lay bare their pain so that justice can be done. We owe gratitude to the media who publicise their stories. We owe gratitude to the thousands of volunteers who work in quiet, thankless ways to ensure that everything possible is done to prevent this life-destroying damage from happening again.

Does the presence of intolerable evil in an organisation mean that it must be abolished, as the former chief executive of Barnados, Fergus Finlay, suggested about religious orders this week? (Finlay wants them all gone, including presumably the religious orders that have never worked with children or the orders who have never had an allegation of sexual abuse against them.)

We do not apply this standard to scouting, swimming or gymnastics. Presumably, Finlay would say these other organisations do not possess vast wealth. No one individual within a religious order is wealthy either, and it would be intolerable if they were.

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You cannot balance the harm done to even one child against the good that has been done. Our rationale for the existence of religious orders, and lay people to practise their religion as a human right, must lie elsewhere

Neither can we do an accounting exercise where we try to balance the good done by religious orders against the harm, whether it be the “little, nameless, unremembered, acts/Of kindness and of love” in Wordsworth’s phrase, or the propping up of the infant Irish State by the provision of essential services the State could not afford.

(Incidentally, Wordsworth’s words come from a poem about Tintern Abbey, which fell into ruin after the dissolution of the monasteries and the seizing of their assets by King Henry VIII.)

You cannot balance the harm done to even one child against the good that has been done. Our rationale for the existence of religious orders, and lay people to practise their religion as a human right, must lie elsewhere.

Our society prides itself on its tolerance, on leaving aside the narrow, bigoted views of the past in favour of enlightened open-mindedness.

What does tolerance mean if it is only applied to beliefs, practices and organisations with which we agree?

Pluralist society

We all fervently agree about the need to root out intolerable evils such as the sexual abuse of children. But not everything is like this. One of the facts of living in a pluralist society is that what one person sees as good and necessary, another may see as evil or misguided. If we can’t have a broad tolerance for people to make their case and discuss these issues, or simply to exist, what kind of tolerance is that?

Righteous anger can be a galvanizing force. The suffering of ordinary Catholics watching yet again the unfolding of the litany of torture and sexual abuse in the church is but a pinprick in comparison to the suffering of the individuals who were abused and their families. But it has spurred anger and action, including safeguarding protocols led by lay volunteers that mean church facilities are among the safest possible for children.

If the decline in the church’s influence means an archbishop cannot lift the phone to a taoiseach and expect compliance, that is wonderful

The church still deserves the public opprobrium it receives for failures to protect children and the subsequent cover-ups. Does that mean the church cannot be permitted to express an opinion on anything that conflicts with the current consensus?

Does it mean that the only acceptable form of Christianity is a kind of private, leisure-time activity for individuals that never frightens the horses?

If the decline in the church’s influence means an archbishop cannot lift the phone to a taoiseach and expect compliance, that is wonderful.

The decline in a sense of community in favour of consumerism, individualisation and atomisation is far less positive. As “Blue Labour” thinker Adrian Pabst has said: “Religion remains central to understanding how and why we are neither isolated individuals nor cogs in a collective machine, but rather embodied beings who are embedded in relationships and institutions – from the family to the nation and beyond.”

When Creeslough was devastated by tragedy, one compassionate man had the capacity to articulate and hold the grief of an entire community. That man, Fr John Joe Duffy, was formed and shaped by Catholicism.

The Church is not just suffering because it tolerated the intolerable. It also managed to lose sight of the clear compassion of Christ, who looked at people and loved them ever before he issued them a challenge to change their behaviour.

New conformity

Our society today equates compassion with active approval of any individual’s ethical choices if those choices are not perceived as harmful. Anything less is unacceptable. But a new conformity will serve our society no better than the old one.

Secularists should continue to condemn the egregious failures of religious organisations and to challenge robustly ethical views with which they disagree. They cannot declare anathema or deny those who are Catholic the right to exist. Tolerance only of those with whom you agree is no tolerance at all.