Pope Paul VI, now a saint, was quite taken with the 1970 film Love Story, commending it as a celebration of love whatever the circumstances. A much-quoted line from the film is that “Love means never having to say you’re sorry”. These days, it seems the Catholic Church is forever saying it is sorry. It is the least it can do.
Were love involved in its dealings with the approximately 150,000 abused children of Canada’s indigenous peoples in the 19th and 20th centuries, there would be no need this week for the penitential pilgrimage of Pope Francis to that country. Nor would there have been a need for his abject apology in Ireland four years ago to abuse survivors of residential institutions for children, of Magdalene Laundries, of Mother and Baby Homes, of clerical child sex abuse in parishes across this island.
How did an institution set up to promote goodness drift so far from the very reason for its existence? How did it so successfully cauterise the decent human emotions of compassion and empathy among so many of its priests, brothers, nuns, and their superiors? And why? What dire dogma persuaded it to so disastrously separate heart from head or, to paraphrase Yeats, bruise body to pleasure soul? There was nothing of Jesus Christ in that but, possibly, too much of ancient philosophers and their interpreters.
Pope Francis feels the pain of survivors, as was evident during his visit to Dublin in 2018. He is a man of the heart and responds accordingly. His own journey on the abuse issue since becoming Pope has been remarkable if belated, from reluctance to accept these awful deeds happened at all, to acceptance, and now to penitential pilgrimages as in Canada this week. Pope Benedict XVI too, though himself more at home with the abstract, did address the issue head on once he became pope in 2005. Sadly, his predecessor Pope John Paul, now also a saint, remained in denial throughout his long papacy and delayed the reckoning, adding to the pain of the unbelieved.