The Irish Times – Monday, March 8, 2010
ANALYSIS: There is no room for the ‘still don’t get it’ mindset if the Catholic Church here is to have a future, writes PATSY McGARRY
IRELAND’S CATHOLIC bishops begin their three-day spring meeting in Maynooth today. They have lots to talk about. All those holes, and still digging.
They might consider this. “The question you have to ask yourselves is: did you know what the institution was doing and the full consequences of what it was doing? Because, if you did, you were complicit with the recklessness. Or if the answer is you didn’t know, then you cannot have been discharging your responsibility . . . properly.”
Those questions were posed by Niall Fitzgerald, former chairman and chief executive of the multinational Unilever, and former chairman of the global media agency Reuters, as recalled in an Irish Times interview on Saturday. He posed them to friends of his in the Irish business world last summer. It provoked “a very ferocious conversation” and “real anger”.
Such questions apply as much to Ireland’s Catholic bishops, not least the “saw no evil, heard no evil” Bishop of Galway, Martin Drennan.
Mr Fitzgerald also made this observation about Irish business figures. “I have been genuinely amazed . . . that they just haven’t got it. They don’t realise the degree of rage and anger that’s around, and that they have to make significant personal sacrifices to rebuild society’s trust in them and their institutions.” So too with our Catholic bishops.
The very latest example of this “still don’t get it” syndrome among the bishops was that speech by Bishop of Ferns Dennis Brennan last Monday night. When it came to “the funding of claims associated with child abuse as perpetrated by some members of the clergy”, it would “be necessary to invite the parishes to become part of the process financially”, he said.
Such “funding sought is not about sharing the blame, it is about asking for help to fulfil a God-given responsibility. That I did not cause the problem is not the response of the Christian . . .” he said.
Later, he ruled out asking the Vatican for financial help to compensate abuse victims. “I do not want to burden others,” he said. “This is our responsibility, and we would like to discharge our responsibilities ourselves,” he said.
Better then to burden the people of Ferns.
Colm O’Gorman, who knows a thing or two about what went on in Ferns diocese, pointed out that the Catholic Church is one of the wealthiest institutions on the planet. He suggested that victims of clerical sex abuse should take cases against the church, so holding the institution itself responsible rather than the people in the pews.
He also reminded us of another very recent “still don’t get it” episode.
“Anyone that was offended by the sheer vulgarity and grandiosity of the pictures that we saw coming out of the so-called summit by Irish bishops in Rome . . . will see the amount of money that swills around in the Vatican and the global church coffers. Let [us] see them divest themselves of some of that sort of wealth,” he said.
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