Media coverage of clerical sex abuse ignores that most Irish are believers who want their church to survive
IN THE tangled subtext of the clerical abuse scandals, every word is apprehended as a potential indicator. Is the contributor a finger-pointer or an apologist, a defender of the rule-of-law or a hunker-sliding dissembler trying to get the church off the hook?
Perhaps in the week to come, marking the week that began our civilisation, it might become possible to step off this battlefield and gain some perspective. Holy Week is relevant not just to those who participate in religious rituals and profess adherence, in spite of everything, to the Christian faith. Without the facts of the first Easter, we would be living in a different reality. (Instantly here, I become alert to the inevitable retorts: “Perhaps we’d be better off!” But it’s not a choice I believe we have.)
In the hectares of coverage since the Ryan and Murphy reports, there has been almost nothing directed at the grief of the Catholic community. Our media apparently assumes it is speaking to an entirely secularised, if not atheistic audience. And because everyone is so anxious not to “give offence” to those who suffered clerical abuse, nobody wants to emphasise considerations other than the vindication of victims.
Nevertheless, there are other considerations, including the question of whether this society any longer wishes to have any religious dimension at all. Just months ago, this might have seemed an extreme observation. I’m not sure it does now.
Nearly the entirety of media coverage is directed at the legal aspects of the scandal: the evil deeds of the pervert priests; the wrongdoing of those who failed to act; the question of resignations or sanctions. If any thought is given to the grief of Catholics, it is treated, implicitly, as a residual cultural oddity with no concrete relevance to the crisis.
There are still a great many Irish people – perhaps a majority – who continue to hold to Christian beliefs. One might therefore expect occasional items to adopt their point of view – if only to ask how Christians might be dealing with the crisis, or to examine the prospects for a genuine process of healing and recovery within Irish Catholicism.
But such questions, perhaps because they might necessitate some relaxing of the onslaught against the institutional church, are rarely canvassed. Even those who continue to proclaim themselves Christian seem impelled, in contributing to the discussion about the scandals, to adopt the logic of the civil power and avoid saying anything that might imply that, as well as caring about the feelings of the victims, they would like to save their church. To advance an argument from within the logic of Christianity – to talk, for example, about the role of forgiveness – is to risk being accused of excusing the wrongdoers.
Most Irish Catholics are deeply angry, not only about what has happened, but about the way this crisis is being dealt with by church authorities now. Many of them might well be inclined to throw their hats at the church.
But Irish people remain mortal. They have not suddenly become self-generating organisms. They have questions of a fundamental nature that cannot be addressed other than in the Christian context. They still need Christ. Can they hope ever again to be able to get to Him? May they even speak about their desire to have Him back?
It is strange, observing the discussion, to pull back a bit and listen for what is being said about Christ. Even in the most comprehensive denunciations of His church, there appears not to be any antagonism towards Jesus. Occasionally, when mention is made of Him, say by a victim of clerical abuse, it is almost always an adverse reference to the failures of church personnel to adhere to the letter of the message they purported to relay.
Christ is about the only one connected to the Irish Catholic Church who has not been called on to resign.
But any comfort to be taken by Christians from such an observation must be short-lived. For, really, any implicit exoneration of Jesus occurs not because of a desire to rehabilitate the Christian proposal, but because there is almost no substantial degree of real belief in Christ remaining in the upper crust – which is to say the media-driven layer – of our culture. What the apparent persisting deference towards Christ betrays is not a genuine openness towards Him, but simply indicates that almost nobody takes Christianity seriously. The Christian proposal has been laid so thinly on our collective consciousness that we do not believe in it other than as a nice story, a useful moral programme and ultimately a shared sentimentality. The presence or idea of Christ may console individuals in their private spaces, but His influence is not regarded by the collective conversation as offering any possibilities for resolving anything.
Resolution, we are told again and again, is a matter for the courts, for the civil authorities, for the State. Nobody has yet announced a post-Christian society, but almost everyone acts as if this outcome is inevitable if not already upon us.