by Medb Ruane
Saturday February 20 2010
The tangled web of Church-State relations was rarely so knotted as this week, when two events conspired to tease it further. Pope Benedict met Irish Bishops in Rome to discuss the child abuse scandals, especially after the Murphy report.
In Dublin, however, the Pope’s diplomatic representative Giuseppe Leanza decided he was unable to attend the Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs to discuss the same sad story. It was extremely unfortunate.
From Rome, people heard that the bishops hadn’t asked Benedict or his Curia why the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) and the Papal Nuncio hadn’t co-operated with the Murphy Commission. Instead, Benedict seemed to present the difficulties as a faith-based issue with particular ramifications for the Irish hierarchy.
He said that a weakening of faith “has been a significant contributing factor in the phenomenon of the sexual abuse of minors” and connected the ‘crisis’ to “the lack of respect for the human person” in society. It sounded like a campaign slogan aimed at the wider world, rather than at abusive priests or secretive Church habits.
A lack of respect for the human person struck the Vatican too because no one had invited abuse survivors to Rome. This meant neither Benedict nor his Curia heard any first-hand testimony about what happened in Dublin, as well as in Ferns, Cloyne and elsewhere.
One of the most touching elements of the abuse scandals is how deeply survivors want Benedict to meet and hear them, almost as though there’s a hope that his better judgment will win out after he realises what was done to them. For some, there’s still a deep faith that good will triumph over evil in the Catholic Church.
But the survivors are ignored, reduced to statistics and denied a voice where it matters. Their suffering is voiced, if at all, by representatives of the hierarchies who frustrated them for so long.
The ethical basis for this cutting-off of survivors must be dubious. Indeed, Benedict’s comments about a weakening of faith contributing to child abuse are exactly opposite to the Irish situation, where faith was so strong that people were encouraged to believe their Pope and bishops would act in their best interests. They trusted them.
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