Madam, – Fr Tony Flannery (“Church hierarchy ‘betrayed’ orders”, June 25th) criticises the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin on his forthright words on the inadequate leadership response of several religious congregations in relation to the shocking findings of the Ryan Report.
Fr Flannery claims that the archbishop has upset elderly members of the congregations concerned.
I very much doubt if the archbishop intended to cause unnecessary distress to anybody.
For my part, I have also spoken to many elderly religious. Most share my great respect for Archbishop Martin and his prophetic no nonsense approach to child protection and abuse issues.
Many also recognise that leadership of their congregations has been as lacking in current difficult circumstances as it was in the past when so much abuse took place.
We are told that the congregations feel betrayed at not being consulted before and after the cardinal and archbishop’s visit to Rome.
I for one thank God that there were no secret briefings of those who by their response to the Ryan Report exacerbated the hurt felt by so many victims and the wider community.
What hurt me most in the immediate aftermath of the Ryan report was the absolute silence of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (Cori) on the major justice issue facing Irish Catholicism.
Cori, which could usually be relied upon to provide authoratitive statements on justice issues and was never slow to lecture governments on financial responsibilities, utterly failed to take its constituent congregations to task.
Cori singularly failed to address the gigantic justice issue facing its own trustees and it fell to Archbishop Martin and some of his fellow bishops to step into the gap. – Yours, etc ,
ALAN WHELAN,
Beaufort,
Co Kerry.
Madam, – There is no doubt that Fr Flannery is speaking not only for many religious but also for many people in the Catholic Church when he expresses the view that they feel ‘betrayed’ by the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, for his public statements upon the publication of the Ryan report.
While no apologist for Dr. Martin I have no doubt he did right by being unafraid in his denunciation and by his acknowledgement of the great evil inflicted on so many of our children by religious in so-called care institutions.
If people interpret such a critique as a betrayal than they are adopting defensive attitudes used in the past by both Catholic hierarchy and religious orders when any criticism was directed at their lack of responsibility on any issue .
As a result so many, both religious and lay, who knew what was being perpetrated in these godless institutions and elsewhere were afraid to speak out for fear of being accused of treachery.
Catholics must face up to the reality that justice demands the full expression of the truth and its acknowledgement.
As an historical communion of believers we cannot wash our hands of the sins of the past; otherwise they will resurrect themselves again and come back to haunt us. – Yours, etc,
Madam, – The religious orders pilloried by the Ryan report have good reason to feel aggrieved by criticism from the bishops.
No Irish bishop has yet put his finger on a key element in the disaster – the Catholic Church’s own hierarchical system.
Contrast the adulation orchestrated by the Irish bishops for Pope John Paul II in 1979 with the total lack of respect accorded to the children in the institutions at that same moment.
At the base of the Irish secular pyramid of esteem, those children were in the charge of religious orders that formed the base of the church’s own pyramid of esteem.
Religious orders like the Jesuits, the Spiritines and Loreto Sisters – who educated the children of Ireland’s middle- and upper -classes – have for that very reason escaped the odium now directed at the Christian Brothers and the Sisters of Mercy.
I vividly remember the differential treatment accorded to the sons of professionals in a Spiritine school in the 1950s in Dublin – the hidden curriculum of deference towards the sons of the wealthy, and relative disregard for the sons of the less well off.
This never came under the notice of those who taught religion – and the bishops of Ireland never questioned Ireland’s secular pyramid either.
They must now explain why as supreme teachers they never conveyed the Christian principle of the equality of all in the sight of God to those who ran the institutions.
The reason is simply that their own non-elective aristocratic system, capped by the monarchical Papacy, overturns Catholic social teaching by teaching the principle of differential respect rather than the principle of strict equality. This is made clear even in the typical seating arrangements for the ordination of a bishop. – Yours, etc,