The church was despised for moral equivocation and for putting loyalty ahead of honesty. Now those same critics are doing the same in relation to Cathal Ó Searcaigh, writes Fintan O'Toole.
HERE'S THE familiar story. The sexual behaviour of a senior and much respected Irish intellectual becomes a matter of public controversy. He is middle-aged and gay. He has much more power and prestige than those around him.
The allegation is that he has misused that power to make sexual approaches to young men. The young men were above the age of consent, so nothing he did was illegal. But they lived in a culture that was unusually sheltered and many of them had little experience of sex. The older man would, the allegations went, select some of these young men on the basis of their good looks. His offer of favours would be intertwined with an obvious sexual interest.
This man's name is not Cathal Ó Searcaigh. It is Micheál Ledwith. He is the former president of St Patrick's College, Maynooth, where he was professor of dogmatic theology. Before 2003, when the allegations emerged, he was regarded as a distinguished international theologian and a probable future member of the Irish episcopacy.
Although far more serious allegations concerning boys who were below the age of consent were later to be raised, the initial controversy was about his behaviour in the mid-1980s towards young adult seminarians. No one at the time maintained that he had sex, consensual or not, with any of these young men. The perceived problem was that he had misused his power and authority to make vague but inappropriate advances towards students he fancied. When these allegations emerged no one, so far as I can remember, objected that the publicity given to these allegations was fuelled by homophobia. No one defended him on the basis that his supposed behaviour was part of a "gay culture". No one implied that the allegations would not have been made if the man in question had been heterosexual and the young people he approached had been female.
No group of Irish intellectuals wrote to The Irish Timesexpressing their outrage at the man's treatment and attacking those who had besmirched his reputation. No distinguished senators or artists stood up to defend him and revile his accusers. It seemed clear to everyone that the issue here was power, not sexual orientation. Yet everything that Cathal Ó Searcaigh's supporters have said in his defence actually applied with far more justification to Micheál Ledwith.
In itself, Ledwith's alleged behaviour certainly deserved opprobrium. Older people in positions of authority, of any gender, should not make sexual advances of any kind towards those who are in their care - full stop.
But actually, in Ledwith's case, there really was a discernible element of homophobia. The behaviour initially complained of was not nearly as bad as that of many heterosexual men in positions of power in the academic world at the time. And the complaint to the Irish bishops from six mature students at Maynooth was explicitly about not exploitation, but homosexuality.
As the Ferns Inquiry report subsequently put it, "this concern was definitely more of an anxiety with regard to orientation and propensity rather than with specific sexual activity". When these allegations surfaced in 2003, however, the concern of the intelligentsia was not that Ledwith might have been the victim of anti-gay double standards but, on the contrary, that the bishops had not immediately fired him.
All the sympathy went to the former senior dean of the college, Fr Gerard McGinnity, who had been victimised for raising his concerns about Ledwith. And we don't even have to ask why Ledwith got no sympathy in media and liberal intellectual circles. He was a priest. He was not "one of us".
What saddens me about the whole Cathal Ó Searcaigh affair is the proof that so many distinguished, thoughtful liberal intellectuals have refused to learn the lesson that we took it on ourselves to teach the Catholic Church over recent years. We despised the church for its moral equivocation, for its culture of denial, for putting tribal loyalty ahead of ethical honesty. When we saw the agony of church people at having to give up "one of their own", we thought that "people like us" would never be like that.
We would know, surely, that you don't need moral courage to point out the failings of the other side. You need it for your own side, for people you know and like and believe in. It's precisely when friendship and loyalty are at stake that morality is tempered in the fire.
There would have been something morally bracing in 2003 about a group of poets writing a letter in defence of Micheál Ledwith like the one that appeared in The Irish Timeslast week in defence of Ó Searcaigh. A claim that the allegations against him were tinged with homophobia would have been a revelation of an uncomfortable reality rather than a distraction from an obvious truth. But, as a defence of someone whose admitted behaviour was so clearly exploitative it would have taught the church, in its worst days, lessons in denial and disingenuousness.