Sir, - Tom Savage (News Features, April 20th) makes a valiant attempt to give us sympathetic insight into the world of the Catholic bishop in Ireland in the child-abuse era, when faced with the horrors of that phenomenon. He paints an affecting picture of a hard-pressed individual, with limited resources, dealing with a phenomenon which was poorly understood, even by secular experts.
What he doesn't do is remind us that the second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965, was to be a platform for radical reform of the Church, and that it was the posture of the Irish bishops as a body, aligned with reactionary forces in Rome, that denied Ireland - and Irish parents especially - those reforms.
In every era the church has changed, learning things from the surrounding secular culture. Its global reach and hierarchical system borrowed freely from Roman imperial and feudal culture. Its fortress and triumphalist mentality following the Council of Trent borrowed from the nation state and empire building of that early modern era.
But then came the late modern era, in which the principles of open government, social equality and democratic accountability revolutionised the secular world. The Catholic Church Hierarchy, still in Tridentine mode, resisted all of these. And when Vatican II eventually promised (especially in Lumen Gentium), a horizontal church, with laity exercising initiative and responsibility through new institutions, the Irish Hierarchy would have none of it.
The point is that the administrative model that Tom Savage uses as a moral shield for the Hierarchy was their deliberate preference. It was this preference that made the hierarchical Irish church a closed, secretive world, with the laity on the outside. And this in turn is why the child abuse phenomenon became scandalous. Whereas in the medieval world, victims of secular violence could look to the church for sanctuary, we in our own lifetime observe an entirely contrary phenomenon: victims of (exceptional) clerical violation fleeing for sanctuary to secular institutions such as the State and the media.
How long will it take for this penny to drop in Drumcondra, Armagh, Maynooth and Rome? Many great Catholic priests in Ireland have been betrayed by the hierarchical power complex that sabotaged Vatican II after Humanae Vitae in 1968 - and that is where responsibility for this tragedy ultimately lies.
This is the administrative scandal underlying the sexual one, and it is time it too was admitted by the bishops and their defenders. That modern secularism should more effectively protect and vindicate the church's own victims is entirely the fault of those churchmen who closed their minds to the principles of openness, accountability and equality - all of them far more compatible with the Gospels than the secrecy, paternalism and non-accountability they deliberately preferred. - Yours, etc.,
Sean ╙ Conaill, Greenhill Road, Coleraine, Co Derry.