Like this:

              The Ryan report in Ireland recently exploded with stunning revelations of child abuse by Catholic priests, nuns and brothers. Thirty thousand children from the lower rungs of society suffered physical, mental and sexual abuse from the 1930s to the 1990s in schools run by the government and religious orders. The commission, a state body led by Justice Ryan, conducted the study over nine years. Controversy over releasing names of  perpetrators slowed its progress.

             The latest expose of child abuse in Ireland landed like a huge aftershock following the American quake felt in Boston a few years ago with its own tremors across the country. In the U.S. court settlements for victims cost billions and have forced bankruptcy on dioceses and religious orders. Similar seismic activity threatens in the Los Angeles area where Cardinal Mahony and his lawyers are fighting law suits.

             Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest and leading expert on clerical child abuse, points out that the problem is not accidental but systemic. It is deeply engrained in Irish child care culture. Doyle claims that church authorities from the pope to local bishops and religious superiors knew about the abuses and condoned or ignored them. Church leadership, satisfied with denials, apologies and blame shifting, has skirted real accountability.

             Promises of future change are dubious without thoroughgoing investigation of  the clerical culture that spawned the problem. Some point to the influence of Jansenism which has had great influence on the Irish clergy (also in the United States where Irish priests played a dominant role). Jansenism is a Catholic deformation of Calvinism. It stresses the evil in human nature and severe disciplines to control it. A premium is placed on conformity to authority at the cost of one’s own conscience. French priests, fleeing revolutionary France in the late eighteenth century, trained Irish clergy in this tradition. 

             It is unlikely that recent Vatican-sponsored investigations of U.S. seminaries and women religious will resolve the underlying maladies. For example, lack of transparency (secrecy) in closed clerical society impedes the openness required to seriously probe issues. A tendency to blame gay clergy for these abuses becomes ever more preposterous in light of the longstanding Irish debacle. I reflect on such issues in my new novel: The Children’s Crusade: Scandal at the Vatican. (www.bianchibooks.com).

Advertisement