The Church made a promise last Monday to do everything necessary to serve the truth. It now needs a breathing space so that it can put mechanisms into place to keep that promise, writes Breda O'Brien
Although personally I would have liked to have seen a great deal more achieved last Monday at the Bishops' Conference meeting, I suspect that in years to come this will be seen as a decisive turning point in the history of the Church. If it is not, or if the time taken to work out the mechanisms of a national audit on child abuse.
For those of us rearing children, this is not an easy time, as the airwaves and headlines scream about children being abused. When I began teaching, the emphasis then on HIV/Aids meant that many young people's introduction to sexuality began with associating it with disease and death. It is no improvement that children's first questions about sexuality may be prompted now by hearing about child abuse.
I attended Mass last Sunday, in a different parish than usual, with my young son. The priest began in very simple and moving terms to speak about clerical child abuse. As an adult, I deeply appreciated the fact that he was addressing it in such a sincere and non-defensive way. As a mother, I could feel my tension building as I wondered what my son would make of it.
We have a family policy of answering questions as they arise, which means my son is a great deal more informed than I ever would have thought he would be at his age, but even still I was not looking forward to fielding that particular one.
Luckily, he did not seem to be listening, as he was reading intently the Creed in the Mass booklet. He looked up in surprise when the priest received a round of applause, then resumed reading. I was just beginning to relax, when he looked at me with those big blue eyes flecked with green and asked me in a stage whisper, "Mammy, why do they call her the Virgin Mary? What does virgin mean?" Surprisingly, that question came as a relief.
One of the most regrettable aspects of the need to keep children safe is that so many normal kind gestures are now open to misinterpretation. Some months ago a priest friend visited us with a big bag of sweets for the children which he gave to me privately. He said that he wanted to give them to me because nowadays people thought that it wasn't appropriate to give them directly. His voice tailed off, and we looked at each other in a kind of embarrassed misery that it was no longer appropriate for a priest to bring sweets to children.
It affects much more than the relationships between priests and children. Friends who are fathers have said to me that they are much more careful about the kind of horseplay they would indulge in with their children, particularly their daughters, and that they feel very self-conscious in public places like parks if they show affection to them.
Another woman said to me that she now is deeply suspicious if an elderly man pats her daughter's head, and that she wonders what his motivation is. She feels completely torn between the need to protect her child and the desire to allow her little girl to have a childhood where she feels that people are good and not to be feared. In contrast, as a child growing up on a farm, I often disappeared for hours on end, particularly I might add, if there was work to be done. No one worried. If any of my children were unaccounted for nowadays for the same length of time, I would be frantic.
This dilemma particularly affects children who have already been deprived. It is no longer considered appropriate to hug or touch children who are in care even if they are desperate for affection. We have lost something when the ones who have been most deprived emotionally now lose out again, this time allegedly for their own good.
Again our attempts to get the balance right flounder. In the past, there was denial of the reality of child abuse, and a complete failure to realise that paedophiles were attracted to and liable to exploit any area where there was easy access to children. Now we are in danger of so sterilising our relationships that human warmth is lost.
Recently on a Prime Time programme we had an ordinary guy declare that he had had 140 partners in a 10-year span. The only voice addressing morality in the programme suggested that we needed to accept changed attitudes to sex and that all that young people need is some guidelines on how to play the "game of sex".
This had a peculiar resonance for me because of something I heard not too long ago. Some young boys told me about a game called IRA bash. It consisted of making up a four-letter word and being chased till you revealed what the letters were, and if you did not do so you got bashed. Since the spirit of the military cell was sadly lacking in these kids and most of them revealed the letters immediately, it was not as alarming as it sounds. At least, until they told me that a variation on the game was called IRA rape. This consisted of lying on the girls in the group until they told their letters. Most of the kids involved were pre-teen. The boys whom I spoke to had walked off when IRA rape was suggested as a game, and got called retards and worse for their trouble.
Our trendy openness is affecting children. No doubt we were too repressed in the past, but I wonder about our alleged progress in matters of sexuality when rape has become a children's game.