In the movie Groundhog Day Phil, a weather forecaster played by Bill Murray, is forced to relive a day over and over. At first he rebels in disbelief against his fate, including spending days trying to kill himself, writes Breda O'Brien
Then he begins to use his time to develop talents and to become the most well-liked and helpful person in town.
Though his motivation is no longer to escape, but to become closer and closer to the woman he loves, eventually he grows enough as a human being to be allowed to wake up on a different day.
The Catholic Church, particularly in Ireland and the US, is experiencing Groundhog Day with regard to child sexual abuse. Just months ago I spoke to people in north America who said confidently that the worst was over in relation to clerical child abuse.
Systems were in place, the safety of children was now paramount and the public as a result had moved beyond an automatic connection between paedophilia and priesthood. So much for that confidence. The United States is in uproar, as the inadequacies of senior clerics are exposed.
In Ireland the life and crimes of Sean Fortune did not go away, either. In one sense they never will. Stolen innocence cannot be returned. But the problem is much wider than Seán Fortune.
The church in Ireland will continue to experience a nightmarish version of Groundhog Day until it begins to grow and mature in the ways demanded of it.
The promised State inquiry into the diocese of Ferns is an important step. It will satisfy the needs of the victims for truth and for accountability. But it will not be enough .
The Ferns crisis has exposed in the cruellest possible way the inadequacies of church structures.
Far from being a massive monolith, it is so dispersed that it was completely unable to frame a coherent response and ended up looking like the shrieking schoolchild protesting: "It wasn't me, Sir."
The disarray made it look as if the church was somehow lacking some basic human understanding of the horrors of child abuse which seemed blindingly obvious to everybody else.
The definition of systems failure is that even the best efforts of individuals cannot prevent the system itself from causing damage.
That has been particularly true of the church. Bishop Colm O'Reilly said on Prime Time that there was no other issue on which the bishops had spent more time, and yet the perception remains that they were no closer to being able to show that they had really tackled the issue.
I am absolutely certain that the vast majority of the bishops are sickened and horrified by child abuse and desperately anxious to bring healing to victims. Yet that concern signally failed to be communicated to ordinary people, including victims.
SO OFTEN the victims said that they either did not feel heard, or were fobbed off with legalities which stoked their anger. Victims I have spoken to have referred to the coldness of the response they received when they made a complaint, including things as simple as not being offered a cup of tea. Although one young man did say to me drily that the person who offered him tea and seemed very understanding subsequently did nothing.
Nevertheless, the human gestures are very important. While reform is needed at the level of structures, it is also needed in the way they relate to people.
It seems almost blasphemous to suggest that this is an opportunity for the Catholic Church to learn and reform, given that the spur for it is the suffering of children.
On the other hand, it would surely be of some comfort to victims to feel that this is not an endless cycle with new generations of children condemned to be hurt as they were.
It is impossible to communicate when trust is lost. How the church acts in the next few weeks will be crucial for its credibility.
The Hierarchy needs to create new ways of linking into the expertise and experience of lay people. Patently they need some kind of crisis management team, though they also need to build structures which mean that there are fewer crises. That means huge investment in communications at every level from people in parishes, to the media, to networks between the bishops themselves.
The Catholic Church, despite its many failings, is deeply entwined in the fabric of Irish life. The way in which it deals with this could act as a template for society as a whole.
As a society, we are still at the stage of demonising paedophiles. It is simply too painful to look at the fact that paedophiles are the ordinary people down the road from us.
We have to face the fact that there are no easy answers. The bishops were among the first to institute mandatory reporting. Yet one bishop told me that this had had the effect of causing one person making a complaint to clam up and to refuse to divulge details which would identify the alleged abuser, because the victim could not cope with going to the health board and the Garda for investigation.
In this instance, at least, it did not improve the future safety of children even if, on balance, mandatory reporting is the only option.
Similarly, if files must be made available to the police, a bishop must caution a priest that any admission could be used against him legally. How likely are priests to come to their bishop for help under those circumstances?
Also, what about the fact that cases can take up to two years to come to court? What do you do with the person during that two years?
Then there is the thorny issue of false allegations. No one even wishes to look at that possibility, but there have been and will be more of them.
In Groundhog Day, in a corny speech on his umpteenth weather forecast, Phil says: "When Chekhov saw the long winter, he saw a winter bleak and dark and bereft of hope. Yet we know that winter is just another step in the cycle of life." For the sake of the victims and for its own sake, the church needs to go through that winter so that it can finally wake up in another day.