The New York Times,
February 9, 2011
Can
the Catholic Church Atone for Its Sins in Ireland?
By RUSSELL SHORTO
Andrew
Madden is one of a relatively new breed of Irish celebrities who
would just as soon be less well known. He was among the first
people in Ireland to go public about being sexually abused by
Catholic clergy — one of those who set off the intense bout
of soul-searching that has racked the country lately. When I met
Madden last fall in Dublin, the early rumbles of the collapse
of Ireland’s economy were shaking the country, and throughout
much of a pub lunch he talked about the failures of the government
and the banks. It was only later, once we were driving around
his old neighborhood, past the pebbledash house where he grew
up and where his parents still live, that he began to talk about
his childhood. As we sat in his car in front of Christ the King
Church, where he spent much of his youth as an altar boy and a
choir member, he outlined the four years of torment he suffered
in the late 1970s at the hands of the Rev. Ivan Payne, one of
the infamous serial sex offenders among the Irish Catholic clergy
whose stories have transfixed the country over the past year and
a half.
Madden has recounted his tale many times for the Irish media,
and there was a rote, dutiful quality to the recitation of the
details. It wasn’t until we pulled up in front of the house
where Father Payne had lived — the scene of the abuse Madden
endured, to which he had not returned since his teens — that
he tensed with what seemed like deeply coiled anxiety and whispered,
“Oh, my God.”
My afternoon with Andrew
Madden might serve as a snapshot of what Ireland has been through
lately. The country is preoccupied with the fallout — personal,
social and political — from the crash and burn of the Celtic
Tiger. But beneath that, and in a way connected to it, is a more
primal pain: one deeper, lodged in the bones, maybe. The phenomenal
economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization
that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer
what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the
Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish
have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state
relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few
people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.
Of the various crises
the Catholic Church is facing around the world, the central one
— wave after wave of accounts of systemic sexual abuse of
children by priests and other church figures — has affected
Ireland more strikingly than anywhere else. And no place has reacted
so aggressively. The Irish responded to the publication in 2009
of two lengthy, damning reports — detailing thousands of
cases of rape, sexual molestation and lurid beatings, spanning
Ireland’s entire history as an independent country, and the
efforts of church officials to protect the abusers rather than
the victims — with anger, disgust, vocal assaults on priests
in public and demands that the government and society disentangle
themselves from the church.
This past December
a fresh bout of fury was touched off by the publication of the
investigation into perhaps the worst clergy sex offender: the
Rev. Tony Walsh, who raped and molested children while serving
as a priest in Dublin and who was shielded by the Vatican even
after Irish Church officials wanted him defrocked. Yet another
large-scale report will be released shortly. And a 1997 letter
— in which the papal nuncio to Ireland told Irish bishops
that the Vatican had “serious reservations” about a
plan for mandatory reporting of clergy sex-abuse cases to the
police — came to light last month, causing further anger.
Among those who were
most outraged by the abuse reports were people in their 20s and
30s, who came of age during the economic upswing and who grew
up in a newly secular culture without a sense of obedience to
the church. “When I saw the reports, I thought, I can’t
even pretend to be part of this club anymore,” says Grainne
O’Sullivan, a 32-year-old graphic designer. Late in 2009,
together with a Web developer named Cormac Flynn and a civil servant
in Cork named Paul Dunbar, she began a Web site, CountMeOut.ie,
which walked Catholics through a three-step process for formally
defecting from the church. It was to be, she said, “a way
of protesting, using their own process against them.” Over
the next several months, CountMeOut became a focal point of anger
at the church; 12,000 people downloaded the official form for
defection — “Defectio ab Ecclesia Catholica Actu Formali”
— from the site.
Then last August, the
Vatican introduced a change in canon law that will apparently
make it impossible for Catholics to defect. Flynn, O’Sullivan
and Dunbar have thus suspended their service. But the Web site
continues to be a clearinghouse for information on the church
in Ireland and its abuses, and it has helped start a debate on
Irish identity — on the possibility of separating the two
parts of the term “Irish Catholic.”
Certainly many Irish
people find the idea of abandoning Catholicism to be as counterintuitive
as giving up their racial or sexual identity. A televised panel
discussion on the abuse crisis last summer ended with a reporter
asking a woman who was voicing her anger if she was ready to leave
the Catholic Church. She paused, as if befuddled, then said, “Where
would I go?” Then again, while until recently, being a member
of the church had obvious social rewards, Eamon Maher, who has
edited books about Irish Catholicism, told me, “now it’s
a positive disadvantage.” Maher continued: “If you go
around saying you’re an ardent Catholic, people will be distrusting
of you.”
Ireland’s move
away from the Catholic Church began before the reports were released.
Between 1974 and 2008, regular Mass attendance dropped by some
50 percent. The situation today highlights a problem that is looming
for the Vatican, especially in the West, as the global sex-abuse
crisis, coupled with the increasingly conservative rule and top-down
control that have prevailed since the 1970s, is contributing to
the departure of populations the church once considered foundational.
“Ireland is a prime example of what the church is facing,
because they made this island into a concentration camp where
they could control everything,” Mark Patrick Hederman, abbot
of Glenstal Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in County Limerick,
told me. “And the control was really all about sex. They
told you if you masturbated, it meant you were impure and had
allowed the devil to work on you. Generations of people were crucified
with guilt complexes. Now the game is up.”
To reach the geographical
heart of Irish Catholicism, you leave the main road in windswept
County Donegal and drive through miles of gorsy heath, past sheep
poised on gray knuckles of rock, until you come to Lough Derg,
a wilderness lake edged with pines. Half a mile offshore lies
Station Island, where according to legend, St. Patrick had a meditative
epiphany in the fifth century, during his mission to convert the
Irish.
Station Island has
been a place of pilgrimage since the Middle Ages. Its director,
Prior Richard Mohan, who has worked there since 1974, greeted
me as I stepped ashore, while a brewing autumn storm roiled the
tea-colored water of the lake. Over lunch in the staff dining
room, he told me how he has modernized the pilgrimage center.
Early pilgrims relived the saint’s experience of huddling
in a pit in the ground. Today there are updated dormitories, showers,
even a gift shop. Prior Mohan said that Station Island “is
in the genes of the Irish people,” so much so that there
is a phrase for making the pilgrimage: going in on Station. Indeed,
Ireland’s greatest living writer, the Nobel Prize-winning
poet Seamus Heaney, devoted what is perhaps his most beloved collection,
“Station Island,” to a meditation on the pilgrimage,
the Irish and their tug of war with the church.
Mohan reckoned that
the island’s impressive number of visitors — more than
20,000 a year — actually relates to a drop in church attendance
in Ireland. Many people have abandoned the institutional church
but not their faith, so they come to this wild spot in an effort
to plug directly into their historical religious tradition without
the mediation of the church. “This is seen as independent,”
he said. In fact, the Catholic Church maintains control over the
island, as it does over dozens of such places around the world.
Over the course of
the 20th century, Station Island became a symbol of the way that
Catholicism rooted itself in the Irish nation. Politics at the
beginning of the century centered on two debates: British rule
and religion. There were those — like the playwright George
Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats — who thought
that the potential break with England constituted an occasion
for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace
a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish
patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and
the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the
political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the
all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which
gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which
to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most
holy trinity.”
Thus the 20th-century
image of “Irishness” came into being: rural, charming,
locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church. The
archbishops of Dublin became something like grand inquisitors,
wielding great power. The church’s heavy influence on Irish
society kept the wider world at bay for a surprisingly long time.
Eamon Maher told me that in the 1970s, his parents found it profoundly
disorienting when the evening recitation of the rosary suddenly
had to compete with American shows like “Dallas,” and
“the world of wealth, flash cars and extramarital affairs.”
Contraception was illegal in Ireland as recently as 1980, and
until 1985 condoms were available only with a prescription.
As secularism advanced
in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland
as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the
country’s structure. In 1977, Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald
noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him
“that Ireland was a Catholic country — perhaps the only
one left — and that it should stay that way” and that
he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic
a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according
to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has
been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state.
As she put it, “In no other European nation — with the
obvious exception of Vatican City — does the church have
this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”
According to Abbot
Hederman, the hierarchy of the church in Ireland believed that
the nation had a special role as a kind of citadel of Catholicism:
“Ireland was meant to be the purest country that ever existed,
upholding the Catholic ideal of no sex except in marriage and
then only for procreation. And the priest was to be the purest
of the pure. It’s not difficult to understand how the whole
system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact
was a complete culture. Because you had people with no understanding
of their sexuality, of what sexuality even was, and they were
in complete power.”
The sexual mistreatment
and corporal punishment that went along with the code of purity
were hidden in plain sight all along. A careful reader of James
Joyce’s “Dubliners” knows this is part of Ireland’s
cultural past, but violence in church-run schools was tolerated
late into the 20th century. The novelist Colm Toibin, who was
in a Christian Brothers school until age 15, told me: “At
times it didn’t feel like there was a line between sexual
abuse and corporal punishment. Every Friday one of the brothers
would take a boy in front of the class, and whichever way he hit
you he’d always put his hand on your testicles. We would
laugh, but in fact you were in a permanent state of fear. I would
vomit in the morning before going out to school. They would hit
you across the face if you got a sum wrong. I suppose they did
teach me to read and write and that I should be grateful, but
I’m not.”
The changes taking
place in Ireland have global ramifications for the Vatican, which
has been beset by controversies. Some could be traced back to
Pope Benedict XVI himself and his tough conservative style, which
has struck many Catholics as insensitive and out of touch, including
his suggesting in a speech in 2006 that Islam is inherently violent;
his reinstatement of an excommunicated bishop who denied the Holocaust;
and his decision to bring back into usage a prayer for the conversion
of the Jews.
But the global sex-abuse
scandal is of a different order entirely. Americans may be inured
to the saga; in the United States, cases made news starting in
the 1980s, and a 2004 report enumerated some 11,000 abuse allegations
covering 95 percent of the Catholic dioceses in the country. But
for other parts of the world, the story is newer, and it is seen
as being less about sex than about the church hierarchy’s
ideas of holding and wielding power. Last year, the scandal swept
across Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. There have been highly
publicized cases in Britain, Italy, France, Malta, Switzerland,
Austria, Mexico, New Zealand, Canada, Kenya, the Philippines,
Australia and other countries. Nearly all involved systemic efforts
to cover up the abuse and protect abusers. Last March, the scandal
pointed toward the pope himself, when it emerged that as archbishop
of Munich he was informed of a decision to return a pedophilic
priest to church duty and then that as Cardinal Ratzinger he failed
to heed the pleas of American bishops who asked the Vatican to
defrock a priest in Wisconsin who molested 200 deaf children between
the 1950s and 1970s.
The Vatican’s
repeated efforts to deal with the scandals seem to bring only
further outcry. During his Christmas greetings, Pope Benedict
touched off another global storm by suggesting that the wider
Western culture had normalized pedophilia. In the estimation of
Peter Nissen, a Vatican-watcher and professor of the cultural
history of religion at Radboud University in the Netherlands:
“This is the largest crisis the Catholic Church has faced
since the French Revolution, and in a way you could say it is
even worse. In those days, the church was a victim of the crisis.
Now she has caused the crisis herself.”
In Ireland the stakes
for the Vatican are tangible. The abuse reports have led to popular
demands that the state disentangle the Catholic Church from the
country’s infrastructure. More than 90 percent of primary
schools are under church patronage — even though they are
state-financed — so that parents generally have no choice
but to place their children in a school with what is called a
Catholic ethos. Most public hospitals are also controlled by the
church, which means that certain procedures that would be commonplace
elsewhere have been problematic in Ireland. These include not
just abortions — which in December the European Court of
Human Rights decreed that Ireland must permit in cases where a
woman’s life is at risk — but also vasectomies, among
others.
Nonetheless, Ireland
is the first country to bring the force of its federal government
to bear against the church, according to Thomas Doyle, a Dominican
priest who was once a canon lawyer for the Vatican embassy in
the U.S. and later represented sexual-abuse victims and also served
as an expert consultant to the Irish investigations. “There
have been three commissions in Ireland, and all were government
funded, all chaired by judges,” he says. “In other places
with a traditional Catholic presence and where there has been
sexual abuse, there is intense interest in what is going on in
Ireland. Quebec has now begun an investigation. There are signs
of it beginning in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain
and France.” Ireland, then, provides a model for investigative
legal action on a host of fronts.
Not surprisingly, the
Vatican is trying to control the damage in Ireland. The pope has
organized a team of top churchmen from outside the country, who
are traveling through Ireland now and who will reportedly investigate
not just its abuse scandal but also its system for training priests
and running parishes. Martin Long, spokesman for the Irish Bishops’
Conference, described this “visitation” as “an
offer of assistance from the holy father, and it is welcome.”
But it, too, has angered many in Ireland, who say that it is precisely
the sort of top-down approach that has put the church into its
current state. The Rev. John Littleton, onetime head of the defunct
National Conference of Priests of Ireland and a prominent Catholic
voice in the country, said bluntly, “We don’t need help
from Rome.” The Rev. Sean McDonagh, a leader of the Association
of Irish Priests, which formed last year after the reports were
published, suggested that to get at the root of the problem, the
team of investigators “should begin by scrutinizing Rome’s
own handling of sex-abuse allegations.”
The Rev. Donald Cozzens,
an American priest who is one of the most-respected moderate voices
on Catholic issues, outlined the church’s wider problem in
these terms: “I’m not aware of any major diocese in
the world that has not had a sexual-abuse scandal, and I believe
part of the problem lies with the very structures of the church.
I don’t want to say change would require a different pope
or even a different culture, but it will require radical openness.
We have to take an honest look at all the things that are in play.
Is mandatory celibacy wise or even theologically sound?”
In proportion to its
population, Ireland easily ranks as the country with the most
reported cases of sex abuse within the church. It is second only
to the United States in the total number of cases, despite a population
approximately one-hundredth that of the U.S. Of the two reports
published in 2009 detailing the findings of civil investigations,
the so-called Ryan Report examined abuse in institutions that
were run by the Catholic Church, while the Murphy Report detailed
abuse within the Diocese of Dublin. The reports fill five volumes
and run more than 2,500 pages. Sample entries from the Murphy
Report include an account of a priest who digitally raped a girl
during confession and then washed his hands in a bowl at the altar;
a priest who probed a girl vaginally and anally with a crucifix;
and a priest who routinely forced altar boys to drop their pants
and beat them and then masturbated. The Ryan Report entries that
detail the desolate existence of the mostly poor children in so-called
industrial schools read like a cross between Charles Dickens and
Dan Brown: “I was beaten and hospitalized by the head brother
and not allowed to go to my father’s funeral in case my bruises
were seen” and “I was tied to a cross and raped while
others masturbated at the side.”
The Murphy Commission
— headed by Yvonne Murphy, a circuit-court judge — noted
in its report that as cases of abuse became public, church officials
repeated the refrain that they had not dealt with abusers properly
because they were on “a learning curve.” The commission
roundly dismissed that claim. The interests of church officials
“were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal,
the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation
of its assets,” the report concluded. “All other considerations,
including the welfare of children and justice for victims, were
subordinated to these priorities.”
Maeve Lewis, executive
director of One in Four, a counseling and advocacy center for
victims of abuse, said that “on paper the church is now ahead
of the state in putting policies in place to protect children.”
The Rev. John Littleton, the former president of an Irish priests’
organization, agreed with this, saying that when a priest prepares
to celebrate Mass at a church in Ireland today, he would never
be alone with a server, provided the church’s new guidelines
for protecting children are implemented. Then again, Lewis said
that based on her watchdog experience: “Many churchmen in
fact feel very hard done by the reports. They don’t accept
the reports at all.”
Martin Long, the Irish
bishops’ spokesman, told me that the church is not just paying
lip service on the abuse issue. “Acknowledgments have been
made that the actions of church representatives resulted in the
institution being placed above the welfare of individuals,”
he said. He then went on, however, to restate the learning-curve
theme, suggesting that church officials had shielded abusers at
the expense of children because “the deviousness and level
of duplicity that perpetrators of abuse exercised was not understood
for a long time,” a reading of the situation to which abuse
victims have repeatedly reacted with scorn. Nevertheless, Long
insisted that today things have finally changed: “The bishops
get it, to use an Americanism.”
Do the church authorities
get it?
Last March, Pope Benedict
issued a pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, which was
much anticipated as the Vatican’s definitive response to
the crisis. Beyond authorizing the visitation of churchmen from
outside Ireland, the letter called on Irish Catholics to pray,
to fast and to engage in “eucharistic adoration.” When
I asked Long what plans there are for rebuilding the Church in
Ireland, he said that the pastoral letter “will be the core
of the pastoral renewal.” Bishop Eamonn Walsh likewise told
me that the Irish bishops’ plan for renewal will focus on
prayer, fasting and alms-giving.
For a reaction to Benedict’s
plan for the country, I turned to a lifelong lay member of the
Catholic Church in Ireland. Marie Collins is a 64-year-old native
of Dublin. In 1960, when she was 13, she was hospitalized for
three weeks at what was then called Our Lady’s Hospital for
Sick Children. The chaplain, the Rev. Paul McGennis, read to her
in the evenings and played games with her, which evolved from
touching her to, finally, digitally raping her. “I had no
idea what he was doing, but I knew it was wrong,” Collins
said. “He might abuse me one night, then give me communion
in the morning.” Collins spent most of the ensuing years
dealing with depression, anxiety and agoraphobia. In her late
30s, she finally talked about her experience, first to a doctor
and then to the curate of her parish. She says he told her that
what happened was probably her fault, that she may have tempted
the other priest, but that he would forgive her. Her spiraling
illnesses went on, while Father McGennis continued as a priest
and an abuser. Ten years later, Collins wrote to the archbishop
of Dublin, Desmond Connell, who is now a cardinal. She says Connell
told her that McGennis was a good priest and that she should not
try to “ruin his life.” Eventually, with the help of
the police and despite intimidation from the church, she succeeded
in having McGennis sentenced to prison. When the Murphy Report
came out, it revealed that church authorities knew about McGennis’s
behavior starting in 1960, the year Collins was abused.
Collins told me that
in the aftermath of the reports, she hoped that church officials
would show accountability. Last year, the news broke that Cardinal
Sean Brady, the highest-ranking Irishman in the Vatican, participated
in the 1975 cover-up of the sex abuse of one of the Irish church’s
most notorious pedophiles, the Rev. Brendan Smyth. The cardinal
considered resigning but decided he would stay in office. “That
means the church here in Ireland is being led by a man who will
not be accountable,” Collins said.
Regarding the pastoral
letter, abuse survivors said they were angered by the fact that
the pope blamed the clergy sex abuse in part on the “secularization
of Irish society,” which Collins said is a far cry from accepting
responsibility. “Prayer and adoration of the eucharist is
fine,” she said, “but we have had the pope on a number
of occasions saying how shocked he is by revelations of abuse
around the world. It’s hard to take that seriously when we
know that as Cardinal Ratzinger, in charge of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith, he saw the abuse reports.”
Events of the past
two years have done to Marie Collins what the abuse itself could
not: “I don’t practice as a Catholic anymore,”
she said. “It’s so hard to reconcile what the men at
the top do with what Jesus preached.”
One Sunday morning
in late November, I wandered into the Capuchin Friary in picture-pretty
Kilkenny just as its Gaelic-language Mass was beginning. The peach-colored
walls were suffused with light, and there was what one would have
to describe as a warm and true feeling of community among those
gathered. Sexual abuse and debt crises seemed far away. As impressive
as the decline in Irish Church statistics has been, the 40 percent
or so of Irish Catholics who go to Mass regularly outpaces some
other once-traditionally Catholic countries. Clearly a lot of
Irish want a faith community. But what kind, and under what conditions?
The Rev. Tony Flannery,
an organizer of the Association of Catholic Priests, told me he
recently attended meetings about the future of the church with
members of a rural parish. “These were Irish people of 60,
70, 80 years of age,” he said. “And I was amazed at
the radical nature of what they were saying. They want women more
involved. They want to take their church back from Rome. The child-abuse
business has shaken the Catholic Church structure here in a way
I would never have felt possible in my lifetime. So for the likes
of me, that’s an upside to all that has happened. There’s
an openness now, among priests and laity.”
I asked him if he thought
the openness extended in any way into the hierarchy, and he laughed.
“Oh, no,” he said, “no indication of that at all.”
Actually, one of the
few high church officials anywhere who has attempted reform is
Diarmuid Martin, the archbishop of Dublin. Martin offered the
Vatican resignation letters from two Irish auxiliary bishops who
were named in the abuse reports. But Benedict refused to accept
the resignations, then passed Martin over for promotion to cardinal.
People who follow the Irish Church say the country’s bishops
have since shied away from the archbishop and are rallying around
the pope and his team of outside “visitators.”
The visitation itself
is seen by many as another indication that the Vatican intends
not to bring reform but to exert control. “If the Vatican
wanted to do a credible investigation of sexual abuse,” Thomas
Doyle said, “they would not send archbishops and cardinals.
These people — the church hierarchy — are the very people
who have caused this problem.”
The economic meltdown,
meanwhile, may be playing to the church’s advantage. Worries
about lost jobs and pensions have taken precedence over concerns
about the church’s role in society. Last summer, there was
talk of a plan to divest the church of its control of state-financed
schools, but when I asked a Department of Education and Skills
spokeswoman last month what the department was doing, she gave
me only the Catholic Church’s current position — that
there is need for “reflection” on the issue — and
actually referred me to the church for further information.
After the abuse reports
were published in 2009, the public was outraged to learn the government
earlier agreed to cap the church’s liability in compensating
abuse victims to what in 2009 was only about 10 percent of the
likely total. Under pressure, Catholic orders last year agreed
to increase that to 50 percent. Some of that money is contingent
on the church being able to sell property in the midst of a financial
collapse. The Irish taxpayer may still end up paying most of the
church’s tab.
Russell Shorto,
a contributing writer, is the author of “Descartes’
Bones” and other books.
Back
to Top
Send
this page to a friend!
