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You are > Home > Raising the siege a year later
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Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Raising the siege a year later
By Fr Brendan Hoban
IT was, Queen Elizabeth II, I think, who popularised the Latin tag annus horribilis after a difficult year during which one of her children divorced and a favoured castle was burned to the ground.
The phrase meaning ‘a horrible year’ summed up her assessment of 1992.
A year on from the Ryan Report and a year that included the Murphy Report, the last 12 months was an annus horribilis for the Catholic Church in Ireland: a shameful litany of trusts betrayed; victims forced to revisit the pain and the heartbreak; the authority and the credibility of the Church damaged, in places irreparably; bishops’ at sixes and sevens; people upset, disappointed, angry; and priests taking the brunt of it all at parish level.
Annus horribilis indeed.
What makes matters worst is not just that there is no light at the end of this dark tunnel but that the Catholic Church is like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, dazzled into immobility and in danger of being run over.We don’t seem to know what to do and even if we did we’re not confident that we’re able to do it.
What is clear is how unprepared everyone seemed to be and how comprehensively the Church lost the media debate.
Limited players playing with a poor hand had little hope of making an impact but no matter how bad a team is, not turning up is conceding more than defeat.
Bishops seemed reluctant to engage with the debate, the priests’ representative body had crumbled a few years ago and almost fifty years after the Second Vatican Council there was no credible lay structure at diocesan or national level to allow even for a discussion of the issues involved.
And programme after programme on radio and television gutted the Catholic Church because, in fairness to producers and presenters, few competent Church voices wanted to participate.
This meant that, effectively, the complexity of the situation didn’t really emerge because the kind of sustained and balanced debate necessary to surface and tease out the nuances didn’t happen.
So a media frenzy ensued, with a tabloid black and white agenda, and without even a suggestion of a tincture of grey. It was about cheer-leading not analysis, circling for the kill rather than a forensic unpeeling of the causes, some journalists unashamedly campaigning on an antiCatholic agenda because they could piggy-back on the palpable pain of the victims.
For some journalists and media outlets, it was a glorious opportunity to get even, to get back, to attack the prey at its most vulnerable so predictable efforts were made to question the Church’s role in education and to make unwarranted and exaggerated assumptions that minimised the contribution of the Catholic Church to Irish society and that exaggerated its failures.
Because the debate was one-sided (and I’m not blaming the media for that) one injustice compounds another. Scapegoating is often the result.
The three agencies responsible for the failures catalogued in the Ryan Report were the Catholic Church, the State and the culture of acceptance that sustained what we now realise was unacceptable, indeed criminal.
Guess who has taken the lion’s share of the blame? For where are the politicians who will hold up their hands? And who wants to blame the culture (i.e. ourselves)?
When scapegoating occurs, in tabloid-speak instinctively we search for a victim. The religious orders (or rather, just some of them) were at the coalface of the problem and their ‘sins’ were the easiest to tabulate, so religious orders in general and the Catholic Church in particular are the most obvious targets on the radar.
The fact that, effectively, no credible defence was offered by the religious orders or the Church makes the chase all the easiest.
I’m not suggesting for a moment that contextualising the situation excuses or minimises the seriousness of what happened or the terrible pain of the victims. It doesn’t.
But what I’m suggesting is that the whole situation is much more complex and more nuanced than we have been led to believe by media reporting.
The point is not new. And Mark Patrick Hederman, the Abbot of Glenstal, makes it tellingly in his recent book, Underground Cathedrals.
It needs to be said – even though saying it might seem to suggest that a focus should be taken off the victims, and I’m not saying that for a moment – that there are factors that need to be considered if a more rounded picture is to emerge from the ongoing debate.
Factors like the attitude to children in the past (especially to those born out of wedlock), the unsuitability of many of those who ran the ‘reformatories’, their lack of training, their lack of formation; their immaturity, especially in sexual matters, the sheer numbers involved, the lack of any vocational understanding of the psychology of adolescence and so on.
Terry Prone, the media guru, suggested in a recent book that “instead of innocent children damaged by religious in whom their care has been vested, the victims, this time around, were innocent elderly nuns and priests and brothers and the attackers were the state, the media, the general public.”
Compounding that was what Prone called the “lack of media savvy” which left the religious defenceless against expertly broadcast exposé packages on TV and the newspapers so that “they were lumped together as, if not collectively committed to perversion, brutality and money-making, at least culpable by association and shared culture.”
One of the predicaments of the Catholic Church in Ireland now is that there is no competent voice to raise the siege the media are laying at our door.
Bishops are made bishops because they will follow a very clear party line which, in many areas, is now redundant and frankly, in some respects, incredible. That conundrum was summed up by historian Diarmuid Ferriter in his recent book, Occasions of Sin, when he described Cardinal Desmond Connell, as “the last person the Church needed, precisely because he was inflexible and driven by his beliefs in absolute truths”.
Laity were never trusted or trained to act as spokespersons or engage in debate as Catholics.
In England, at present, a retinue of competent and committed Catholic lay-persons are engaged in media training with the intention of engaging with debates in an effort to stem the flow of anti-Catholic rhetoric in the British media.
If we had trusted, trained, empowered our people, it could have been a very different Church but we knew better and now we are reaping a bitter harvest.
Raise the drawbridge.
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