North of the Shire

A long time ago I made the error of judging the truth of a religious belief and system of beliefs, based upon the actions of a few that were leaders of a local congregation of that particular belief system. Hypocrisy can be found almost anywhere and among religious we look more intently for it if we are so inclined.

As it happened, I discovered that there were other reasons, sound legitimate theological reasons for leaving that faith community behind and I entered the Catholic Church. By then I realized that the truth of the faith is not measured by how seriously its adherents take it. Indeed, at the time I entered the Church the clerical abuse scandal in the Boston, Mass area was at its peak. But there had been other scandals and most recently it has been the same thing all over again in Ireland.

I think that in this case, while the details of the problem are terribly sad and a real indictment of the leadership of the Church in Ireland, the report that was commissioned was very instructive, and well worth reviewing for its clear assessment of what went wrong, who was responsible and what it was they were thinking.

Here’s an excellent article by Michael Kelly on that report called, The Wolves Roamed Freely.

I have encountered the same sort of argument that I would have made many years ago, that those Christians, or those Catholics cannot be right about their religion because they themselves do such bad things. At the very least they don’t follow their own teaching. That argument is compounded and magnified when the offenders are the leaders of the Church, in this case the Bishops of Ireland.

Moreover, in the Catholic faith, unlike the many Protestant groups, there is not the possibility of leaving the Church and starting one’s own. The full recognition must be made, even by those the most aggrieved, that despite the abuse, despite the betrayal of trust, despite the lack of honest and fair leadership, the truth of the faith itself lives on, and the objective necessity of the sacraments remains, as well as the necessity of the ordained ministers of those sacraments.

That is a hard pill to swallow, and I cannot in the least blame those who are the victims in all of this. I cannot imagine what it is that goes on inside of them, and I pray the Lord guides their hearts and minds, wherever they end up going, so long as they do not reject Jesus Christ as a result. That would be the worst harm that could come to those souls, and the reason that Jesus took very seriously those who lead “little ones” astray. He did not mince words, saying it is better that a millstone were hung about such a person’s neck and that they be drowned. That’s rather unequivocal.

He also preached forgiveness and we believe that even those abusers can be forgiven, as well as their confreres and superiors who effectively collaborated with them by hiding the abuse. But we also know that such a thing requires true contrition on the part of the sinner. There is no fudging this. Jesus takes this extremely seriously.

But what I found interesting about the report on the investigation in Ireland was that it seems that the secular authorities resisted some of the temptation to generalize against the Catholic Church in a way that is so prevalent over here. Perhaps that is because it was in Ireland, whose long history has been closely intertwined with the Church for much of that time.

But it goes to the point we were making earlier, that the truth of the faith is a separate issue from the way in which some do or do not practice it, including the clergy and leaders of the Church. In fact, there is an interesting take on the entire question expressed in the report. It is quite lengthy but nonetheless quite damning of what we might call “The Spirit of Vatican II”;

Before the report was published in late November, it was common among some commentators to insist that the root of the crisis was too heavy a reliance on canon law. Michael McDowell, a former Minister for Justice, even insisted that the abuse of children was compounded by canon law.

Judge Murphy’s report demolishes that mythical thinking in one fell swoop and serves as a vindication of the Church’s law. The report makes it clear that canon law was not the problem. In fact, the problem of child abuse by clerics was made worse by the reckless actions of Church officials, who simply refused to implement canon law. In the opening pages of the Murphy Commission report, it is made clear that Church law refers to the abuse of a minor as the “worst crime.”

As the commission wrote: “There is a 2,000-year history of biblical, papal, and Holy See statements showing awareness of clerical child sexual abuse…. Over the centuries, strong denunciation of clerical child sexual abuse came from popes, Church councils, and other Church sources. These denunciations are particularly strong on ‘offences against nature’ and ‘offences committed with or against juveniles.’”

“The 1917 Code of Canon Law decreed deprivation of office and/or benefice, or expulsion from the clerical state for such offences,” the report notes. The commission goes on to report that “in the 20th century, two separate documents on dealing with child sexual abuse were promulgated by Vatican authorities.” The documents, says the commission, were “little observed in Dublin.”

The report also notes that in Dublin “the Church authorities failed to implement most of their own canon law rules on dealing with clerical child sexual abuse.” In a vindication of the law of the universal Church, the report notes: “The commission is satisfied that Church law demanded serious penalties for clerics who abused children. In Dublin, from the 1970s onwards, this was ignored.”

The report goes on: “Canon law provides the Church authorities with a means not only of dealing with offending clergy, but also with a means of doing justice to victims, including paying compensation to them.”

For David Quinn, director of the Iona Institute, the reports’ findings about canon law are crucial. “What we see in the report is a rejection of canon law by more liberal elements within the Church,” he said. “From the 1960s onwards the Church’s penal process is virtually abandoned in Dublin and a purely therapeutic approach to the issue of sexual abuse by priests is adopted.”

According to Quinn, “within liberal elements canon law began to be discredited and this has wreaked the most terrible havoc.”

His contention is backed up by the report itself. Judge Murphy notes, “Canon law, as an instrument of Church governance, declined hugely during Vatican II and in the decades immediately after it.”

“What’s clear is that an attempt to correct an excessive legalism in the Church pre-Vatican II led to an opposite extreme where the laws of the Church became so disrespected in some circles that it was impossible to enforce them,” Quinn added.

The general disrespect for Church law is made clear time and time again in the report. In one section, the commission notes the case of a Father Vidal (this is a pseudonym) who admitted to abusing young girls and to being engaged in an ongoing sexual relationship that began when the girl in question was just 13 years old. By the time the girl reached her early 20s, Father Vidal decided to marry her and applied for laicization.

However, before his laicization process got underway, Father Vidal was illicitly and invalidly married to the girl in a Catholic ceremony by one of his fellow priests. When the marriage broke up five years later, he seamlessly returned to ministry and, to avoid public scandal, was transferred from the Dublin archdiocese to the Diocese of Sacramento, California. The US diocese was never informed of Father Vidal’s past.

For Marie Collins, who was sexually abused by a priest while she was a patient in a children’s hospital, the Church’s response to her abuse destroyed her once-cherished Catholic faith. “My abuser didn’t take my Catholic faith,” she told CWR. “That was taken from me by the appalling way I was treated when I came forward. I was accused of lying and I was bullied. I am still a Christian, I have my faith and devotion to Jesus Christ, but my Catholic faith, which I loved and cherished so dearly, I have lost that and it makes me very sad.”

For those not familiar, the so-called spirit of Vatican II was a self-described movement that used the fact of the Second Vatican Council as the springboard for a radical, liberal, sometimes relativist agenda which wreaked havoc on the liturgy, catechesis and on the faith of the people who were led astray by its claims that since Vatican II everything is changed, including moral standards of conduct and received doctrine. Their advantage was confusion and ignorance, because many people had not read the documents. In fact most people had not read them. The average Catholic was taught misinformation.

I have heard even recently expressed an opinion from someone who hasn’t been to Church in a long time regarding a young couple getting “fixed” so that they cannot have any more children. “Oh, the Church doesn’t teach that anymore,” was the expression when told that as a Catholic, that is out of the question. Sad. The Church does still teach that and has produced many documents that not only teach it but give a very thorough theological background for the teaching as received from Christ.

In the context of the abuse in Ireland we see another sad example of the fruits of “the Spirit of Vatican II” in the refusal to abide by Canon Law. Is it not reasonable to think that in the course of 2000 years this issue might have come up already? Indeed it has, and the Church has taken it very seriously and put in place the measures and procedures required to do justice for the victims of such abuse.

The question then becomes, why? Why not follow the Church law and deal with this when it first became known to the Bishops in Ireland? Their answer was that they thought they were protecting the good name of the Church. But look at them now. The good name of the Church has suffered as much or more, they have been shamed for their cover-up, and there are victims and others who believe they no longer can trust the clergy, and what can we say to them?

We know that the vast majority of the clergy in the Catholic Church have suffered as well because their brother priests have brought shame upon them all, mistrust among their parishioners and hatred from many outside the Church. Ordinary Catholics have felt the shame and suffered for this as well. I, myself, have been mocked for being Catholic because of this scandal. It touches us all yet we know that the true Church founded by Jesus Christ subsists in the Catholic Church. We cannot leave.

I think that we should not hesitate to make the case loudly that this abuse scandal is just one more fruit of the “Spirit of Vatican II” movement in the Church. We need to pound it home. We need to beat the drum. This is a very tangible result, with very real victims, of that movement which has no doubt given the devil himself many a hearty guffaw. We need to push back in the name of Jesus Christ and his Church.

This unholy spirit is really a branch of secular humanism. It is based on the sentiment, the idea that the past is irrelevant to now, the people no longer need the doctrine of the past, the moral prescriptions and the means to be reconciled with God. Humanity is improving on its own, heading for higher ground and it can trust the sciences of psychology and psychiatry to handle the moral problems of men. And if that doesn’t work we can always change the discipline of the Church, because after all, a celebate priesthood is a relic of the Dark Ages, is it not? If priests could marry we would have more of them and they would not be abusers of children, right? The statistics of abuse show that this solution is hogwash.

But in the meantime, we have started along this path of forgetting that mankind is the same moral mess that he was in Jesus’ day, or in Moses’ day for that matter, or at any time in history since the fall of Adam and Eve. We have forgotten, conveniently, that sin is still sin, and that God is still God, and the way to reconciliation is through contrition, sorrow for sin, and then forgiveness. And we cannot come to that point until we recognize sin for what it is in the first place.

In this season of Lent may we take the time to examine ourselves, our consciences, in honesty and humilty, looking to the great unchanging doctrines of the Church, received from Christ through his revelation in Scripture and Tradition, and sincerely fall on our knees and ask forgiveness for our failures.