The God Squad

Church of England leaders aren’t to blame for the erosion of Catholic moral authority, says Eilis O’Hanlon

Sunday April 11 2010 Sunday Independent.

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s Easter message this year addressed the feelings of discrimination felt by many Christians in Britain who have been pressurised into not wearing crucifixes at work in case it offends people of other religions. By which, of course, he meant Muslims, because nobody cares less about the feelings of Hindus or Jews, since they don’t express their dissatisfaction in the form of exploding planes, trains and automobiles.

Catholic clergy in Ireland could only look on with envy, longing for the day when they too could deliver sermons on such comforting topics. Instead, at Easter they were forced, once again, as they probably will be for many Easters to come, to spend one of Christianity’s holiest times of year dealing with the ongoing fallout from the child-abuse scandal. That scandal keeps reaching deeper into the hierarchy, with a Norwegian bishop, no less, resigning last week after admitting to the past sexual abuse of an altar boy. He is the most senior churchman to have fallen from grace as a result of actual abuse, but the tentacles of allegations of a cover up now reach as high as the Pope himself, and there’s not much further up it can go than that, except to God Himself, and He seems keen on keeping out of this one.

“You’re on your own, lads,” appears to be the Almighty’s attitude to his earthly representatives in Rome, and you can hardly blame Him for that.

“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” was Christ’s message, not, “Make the little children suffer.”

What must be especially painful for Catholic clergy is that they’re unable as a consequence to hitch a ride on the Victim Express which has been rolling its way through the ranks of Christians for the last few years, picking up ever more passengers along the way convinced they are being unfairly targeted for criticism, by the media in particular. The Catholic Church would love to step right up on to the footplate of that particular engine; but every time it heads to the station, there’s another impassioned protest waiting.

The thing is, it would probably make a hames of it. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had the wisdom to step back from the more extreme manifestations of the growing victimology among Christians, pointing out that banning people from wearing crucifixes at work had more of the flavour of “bureaucratic silliness” than persecution. He also warned fellow Christians against using “overheated” language, urging them to “remember those many, many places where persecution is real”.

As a result, he was able to then deliver a few well-aimed digs at prominent anti-Christian commentators (the spirit of that humanist zealot, Richard Dawkins, loomed large, though he went unnamed), who constantly harp on about the dangers posed by the Bible-bashers while declaring that their time is at an end. As Dr Williams pointed out, why get so irate about something which is allegedly dying out anyway?

That kind of measured, more nuanced and witty response is still alien to the Catholic Church, where the feelings of persecution are rarely tempered by taking note of the bigger picture, and where overheated language is always the preferred mode of discourse. That much was obvious recently when the Pope’s personal preacher, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa, compared the treatment of practising Catholics today to that of Jews in Nazi Germany. He later retracted the remarks, but it was the fact that he made them at all which was significant. It was a disturbing insight into how the Vatican sees itself in the child abuse scandals as it sinks, in the words of the Economist, “ever deeper into self-pity, laced with conspiracy theory”.

The self-pity manifested itself glaringly last week when Catholic clergy reacted angrily to comments by the same Archbishop of Canterbury that the Church in Ireland had lost “all credibility” because of its handling of child abusers.

As always, context is everything. Rowan Williams didn’t exactly say that. He quoted second-hand from an Irish friend of his, a priest, who had remarked on the difficulty of walking down some streets in Ireland now wearing a dog collar. He then concluded: “An institution so deeply bound into the life of a society suddenly losing all credibility — that’s not just a problem for the Church, it is a problem for everybody in Ireland.” Which is putting it mildly.

That didn’t stop Irish Catholics from overreacting, with the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, quickly dismissing the comment, saying that the Church in Ireland “did not need this comment on this Easter weekend, and do not deserve it”. The note of whining was unmistakable, and was reinforced by Dr Martin declaring that he had “rarely felt personally so discouraged” as he had on hearing his English counterpart’s remarks.

His personal discouragement really is nobody’s problem but his own, and it pales into insignificance next to the pain of a child who has first been abused, and then has to watch the abuser protected by fellow priests. It wasn’t a very clever response either. Certain Gospel passages about taking the beam out of one’s own eye before criticising the mote in the eyes of your Anglican brethren across the water certainly came to mind. The Catholic Church will get nowhere until it learns to humbly take a few knocks for the team, as it were.

Rather than looking for an apology from the Archbishop of Canterbury (and getting it, too), it would have been better off facing up to the fact that the diminishment in the moral authority of the Irish Church has not come about because bearded liberals in clerical garb in Canterbury made a few anodyne remarks. Nor are Church of England leaders to blame for the growing campaign against the Pope’s forthcoming visit to the UK. All those wounds have been self-inflicted, and they’re the only physicians who can heal themselves.

Until then, few people are going to be listening. Which is why there was such a muted response from the Church to the lifting of the Good Friday booze ban in Limerick. An old taboo was breached, and the silence from the pulpit was deafening. Christmas will surely fall to the drink-sodden pagans next, and the Church will still be too busy making excuses and feeling sorry for itself to mount a coherent defence. Or did the clergy just not bother because they were all down the bar, drowning their sorrows?