RITE AND REASON:The abuse disaster has widened a gulf between spirituality and religious practice
THE MURPHY report has focused reactions to clerical abuse around the issue of “cover-up”.
Covering up is what institutions, as well as individuals, tend to do with their shame. It may be time to look at shame.
The early saints Gregory, Ambrose and Jerome, according to scholar Peter Brown, shared an assumption that “sexuality, hence marriage and the creation of the family, could only have followed the Fall of Adam and Eve”.
For St Augustine, Brown says, sexuality served one, strictly delimited, purpose: “it spoke, with terrible precision, of one single decisive event within the soul. It echoed in the body the unalterable consequence of mankind’s first sin”.
The Fall, it seems, inaugurated a long association of sex and body with shame. Fig leaves served the primal cover-up. The received story of Christian incarnation escapes the sin connection. Theologian Anne Thurston sees the tradition of virgin birth as a “sanitising”. The sceptic notes the infant narrative is put forward in only two of the four gospels.
Vincent McNamara, moral theologian, says the story of original sin cast a long shadow: “The tradition read the symbol too sharply and there has been handed down to us a potent cocktail of pain and guilt and confusion”. We may reflect on the culture in which the worst clerical abusers were reared in Ireland: Seán Fagan wrote of the “spiritual abuse” which “crippled many generations of Catholics”.
The basic principle, he reminded us, was that “all directly voluntary sexual pleasure is mortally sinful outside of matrimony” (which is to say, meriting hell for all eternity). He wrote that “textbooks were unanimous in describing ‘company-keeping’ as a necessary occasion of sin”.
The phenomenon of abuse is obviously complex, but it seems reasonable to suggest a link with repressive conditioning. Damage would also have been magnified for victims reared in a culture of guilt and shame and thus rendered unable to communicate their experience.
We may be looking here at a fault-line in the Christian tradition. A whole generation, who did not buy the hell-fire threats, but who did absorb the story of abuse, has simply walked away. The abuse disaster has widened a gulf developing between what is understood as spirituality and what is understood as religious practice.
Many people, most especially women, now prefer to follow a pathway to spiritual experience based on meditative practices to promote “presence”, or “awareness” or “mindfulness”.
These draw on the insights of modern psychology but are also informed by Eastern traditions, giving just place to the body, to sensation and emotion, as integrated with the intellect.
Charles Taylor, author of a recent monumental study, A Secular Age, adopts the label "excarnation" to refer to how movements of reform in Latin Christendom caused a mutation of religious life so it comes more and more to reside "in the head".
Taylor also speaks of a “long-standing obsession in Latin Christendom to nail down with ultimate, unattainable and finally self-destructive precision the bases of final, unchallengeable, inerrant authority, be it in a certain form of Papal decision, or a literal reading of the Bible”.
Rome cannot fix this. If Ireland is for now the epicentre, then structures for a new dialogue should be put in place right here.
Theologians of more open minds should be brought in from the cold. There are prophetic voices available among those who have been hurt. Bishops who have tendered resignations may have unique reflections. Pending consideration of women’s ordination, women suitably gifted should be speaking in churches.
Fergus Armstrong is a mediator with ONEresolve and a former chairman of law firm McCann FitzGerald. He is a member of the board of RTÉ