We’ve finally realised that children are not to be fed to the Church’s power or sacrificed to its ministers, writes Emer O’Kelly
Sunday Independent, 15th March 2009
HE looked old and he looked wrecked; a far cry from the plump, effervescently supercilious individual in the expensive tailoring who arrived in Cork from Rome in the Eighties.
Even then, John Magee had suffered an Icarus-like fall from grace. He had been at the dizzy heights of a glamorous diplomatic career in that most complex, conspiratorial and Machiavellian of institutions, the Roman Catholic Church. He had served as private secretary to no fewer than three Popes. What secrets must he have been privy to? What must his influence have been? How extraordinary must have been his knowledge of the intricacies of church and state around the world?
Suddenly he was arriving in Cork, not with the pomp of a Papal visit, but as the new Bishop of an obscure country diocese. It was never explained; the Vatican does not explain itself.
But there was further to fall, leading to the haunted, ravaged man who addressed a congregation at weekend Mass in St Colman’s Cathedral in Cobh, with the expected announcement that he was being replaced in his diocese by an Apostolic Administrator.
The fall’s retributive justice is almost mediaeval, even though it was not inevitable. John Magee has effectively come to the end of the road: disgraced, hung out to dry by his superiors because they have had to bow to another inevitability, one that continues to bewilder them in their ivory towers. They were unwilling to do it, they hung on grimly, not so much refusing to accept the appalling nature of their Brother’s behaviour, as genuinely bewildered that the “faithful” — those of lesser immensity and importance — considered it so appalling.
There is something in the human psyche that no amount of authoritarianism can snuff out: we will rise from any cowed depth to protect children. That was the Vatican’s mistake; that was John Magee’s mistake: neither the organisation nor the man comprehended that.
How could they? They are an institution dedicated to male celibacy and fear of women: their iconic image of complete womanhood as unworthy is an enduring one. Their belief is that only a virgin was worthy to give birth to the Christ. In faith, everything must be sacrificed to coldness and emptiness. The joy and beauty of children, and the glory of sex, leave them bewildered and fearful.
Objectively, it’s possible to feel sympathy for John Magee: he was behaving as Canon Law expects a good servant of the Church to behave; he resisted civil authority to the end in order to protect the Church’s reputation. It was what he had vowed to do when he was ordained.
In his world, the strange world of the swishing robes of the Vatican and its Canon Law, truth is never objective: truth is what the Church wants it to be, not “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” that is the oath in the civil and criminal courts. Truth is the protection of the Church at all costs, even at the cost of peace of mind for terrified children.
So he must feel aggrieved that he has been abandoned by his superiors and fellows to the pointing fingers of his flock. As a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, he answers to only one High Authority. That high authority is supposed to supersede all others. But in the real world which has now reached even the formerly unquestioning and subservient Ireland, there is a higher authority than the Church — at least when it comes to the welfare of children — and that’s the law of the land.
Irish people (most of them) have finally realised that while adults may choose to submit themselves to the will of a misanthropic and misogynistic Church, children deserve protection from it. They are not in the world to be fed to the Church’s power or sacrificed to the perverted sexuality of many of its ministers.
The Church will not change. Even the faithful must accept that a Church which expects its ministers to live celibate will attract a higher than normal proportion of people with twisted sexual urges, who in turn will seek their superiors’ protection from the will and laws of the people.
When the actions of the vile Sean Fortune — who had ritually and serially committed homosexual rape on youngsters — were finally shown up in public, there were those (mostly women, unfortunately) who said it had been “a long time ago” and it was “time to move on”. There were echoes of that only a week ago at the cathedral in Cobh, when members of John Magee’s congregation said his removal was a “sad day for the people of Cobh”. Others said he didn’t deserve to be treated as he had been. One said he had no objection to Magee staying: his only “crime” in the speaker’s eyes having been to remove the altar rails. Another interviewee said she felt very sorry for him as a “scapegoat, hunted out by the media”.
There is still a conflicted Ireland out there.
They saw and sympathised with John Magee’s ravaged face. They didn’t hear the children’s weeping; they didn’t see their blotched faces and bruised bodies. That is the sin of the Church: the soaring music can still muffle the ugly sounds of brutalised suffering. And our State still only dimly comprehends this; educated by the Church, our legislators want to believe in its essential goodness.
And as long as the Church is permitted to influence, much less control our schools, we will not come to terms with the twisted thinking of child abuse. The Church must not be allowed to exercise any more power over the minds, hearts and bodies of our beautiful children.
It is, after all, almost a generation since the names of Sean Fortune and Brendan Smyth polluted society. And there is still equivocation.
