Pope Benedict's Pastoral Letter to Irish Catholics

This weekend, in every Catholic church throughout the land, Pope Benedict’s “Pastoral Letter of the Holy Father to Catholics in Ireland” will be read from the pulpit. Those of us who won’t be present can, however, rely on the miraculous intercession of the World Wide Web.

See PASTORAL LETTER
OF THE HOLY FATHER POPE BENEDICT XVI TO THE CATHOLICS OF IRELAND

The letter contains 4,674 words, but says nothing of any note. There is an apology, but El Popo could hardly say he wasn’t sorry for his organisation's cover-up of child abuse and its active role in moving the perpetrators to fresh pastures where they could find new victims to abuse.

There is a lot of talk about “forgiveness” in the letter. Thing is, I – and many of you, I imagine – grew up in an Ireland where there was very little Christian forgiveness, and even less tolerance. An Ireland in which the Church’s values and mores were inflicted on everyone, believers or not. An Ireland in which people were even denied contraception and divorce.

The Catholic Church inflicted its vision of official morality on all of us, and denied us basic rights - even as its representatives were engaged in, and were covering up, the worst kind of sins (to use its terminology).  They even ran/run the majority of our schools.  And since when was it ever a good idea to entrust vulnerable children to the care of sexually frustrated priests, nuns and brothers sworn to an unnatural life of chasity?

Then again, none of that is surprising in a so-called "republic" based on a constitution beginning with “In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority . . .”   And no prizes for guessing which organisation was charged with dispensing that authority?

I couldn’t care less what the Pope, Ian Paisley, the Ayatollah or Reverend Moon says - but I did read Benedict's mealy-mouthed apology out of a fascinated curiousity.  From what I can see, the Church seems to blame “growing secularisation” in Ireland as being at the root of its problems.   Now that depends, I suppose, on what it sees the problem as. The actual abuse itself or the fact that it was found out.  See extract below: 

“4. In recent decades, however, the Church in your country has had to confront new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularization of Irish society. Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values. All too often, the sacramental and devotional practices that sustain faith and enable it to grow, such as frequent confession, daily prayer and annual retreats, were neglected. Significant too was the tendency during this period, also on the part of priests and religious, to adopt ways of thinking and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the Gospel. The programme of renewal proposed by the Second Vatican Council was sometimes misinterpreted and indeed, in the light of the profound social changes that were taking place, it was far from easy to know how best to implement it. In particular, there was a well-intentioned but misguided tendency to avoid penal approaches to canonically irregular situations. It is in this overall context that we must try to understand the disturbing problem of child sexual abuse, which has contributed in no small measure to the weakening of faith and the loss of respect for the Church and her teachings."

"Canonically irregular situations"?  The fact is, it is only due to "increasing secularisation" that the scandal of clerical abuse was ever uncovered at all.  It is only through "increasing secularisation" that  the scandals of Ireland's Magdalene Laundries and industrial schools were officially exposed and  retrospectively condemned.  

People knew about these things at the time but they were too stupid, too cowed, and too in awe of the Catholic Church and Official Ireland orthodoxy to do anything about them.   Just as when instances of clerical abuse were reported to gardai on rare occasions, they chose not to act. In the cases of the laundries and the industrial schools gardai (police) actively condemned young lives to them.

And can we really be expected to believe - those of us who base our beliefs on rationality - that the people sitting in Leinster House and on local councils thoughout  the land at the time had no idea what was going with regard to all or any of  these scandals either?

So let us not "forgive", and let us not forget, the role of the State and its agents in all of this.

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