The Archbishop’s tears prove there is no monopoly on compassion

ATERRIBLE story’. There are no other words to describe the burial of almost 800 starved, neglected, unloved babies in an unmarked grave that once served as a sewage tank. There are no other words to convey the horror of such cruelty, or the culpability of the supposedly Christian institution that oversaw those infants’ treatment for decades: snatched from their unmarried mothers (many of whom spent desolate years pleading for the return of their children, working in kitchens and laundries just a stone’s throw from where their babies were being ill-treated and malnourished), succumbing to avoidable illnesses, and dumped in a ready-made pit without so much as a scrap of sheet to wrap their tiny bodies.

There are no other words to describe the contempt of their so-called carers for these pitiful scraps of life, or the revelation that they had lain in their cesspit, an anonymous mesh of small bones, forgotten for generations. There are, in fact, no words at all.

So it shouldn’t surprise us that Archbishop Diarmuid Martin struggled to find the right words, when he first told Pope Francis about the unfolding revelations of the Tuam Babies scandal, or that ‘a terrible story’ was how he began to explain the shocking details that were then emerging. And yet the break in the Archbishop’s voice as he recalled that conversation in a radio interview at the weekend, the emotion that halted him briefly in his account of the exchange before he could compose himself and move on, was not the reaction we have come to expect from the Catholic Church’s royalty when they deal with such matters. Denials, cover-ups, fudges, stone-walling, that’s what we’re used to. Mealy-mouthed explanations about times being different then, or pompous doubts and defences, smooth recourse to canon law, evasive allusions to the society and culture of the time, those have been the fall-back positions of so many church leaders, here and abroad, when called to account for their institutions’ past transgressions. We are not accustomed to hearing archbishops in tears.

And yet, when you think about it, why shouldn’t Diarmuid Martin be just as saddened and moved as everyone who has shed a tear for the poor forgotten babies of the Tuam mother-and-baby home? He is a prince of the Church, for sure. He appears to be a close confidant of the Pope and, like most senior clerics, his elevation almost certainly required political nous. But he is also a man, and one who has been singularly exposed to the sufferings of so many victims of religious and institutional abuse over the past number of years.

Before you could take the skin-and-bones corpse of a starved ‘bastard’, as those nuns would have seen their little charges, before you could toss that tiny cadaver into a pit on top of hundreds of other skeletons, you must first have been able to dehumanise it. You must first have convinced yourself that it was not as authentic a person as you were, not as deserving of compassion or love as you were, not as sentient or conscious as you were, not as capable of feeling pain or loneliness or hurt or despair. By tarring all senior Church figures with the sins of some of their number, accusing all of complicity in the institution’s failings and reproaching all for their cynicism, perhaps we are doing them the same injustice.

Dignity

In the week that is in it, the Archbishop’s audibly genuine emotion was a timely reminder that nobody has a monopoly on conscience or compassion, that the Catholic Church to which most of us still claim allegiance is full of good and decent people and that most of them, including Archbishop Martin, are struggling, like the rest of us, to do their best and to live their best. Everybody weeps and bleeds and hurts and it is not just their humanity we deny when we forget that – it is also our own.

It will be a challenge for all of us, over the next few months, to debate a subject as fraught as abortion without forgetting that those who disagree with us are people with consciences too. There are, of course, cynical manipulators at both extremes, with their own agendas and their own long-term purposes. But most people are trying to do their best, trying to make the right choice, trying to negotiate a pathway through a landscape that is confusing, unsettling, and conflicted, and hoping to arrive at a decision with which they can live.

If this debate is to be conducted with dignity, it will require us all to credit others with as much sincerity and integrity as we believe inform our own views. And it will also require respect for the faith, traditions and cultures of others – and not just those faiths, traditions and cultures that benefit from the approval of the politically correct and the tireless virtue-signallers, either. It has become fashionable to sneer at Catholic beliefs, observances and teaching in a manner that very few of our bravest politicians or commentators would risk displaying towards other, less tolerant, faiths. Joan Burton has always struck me as an admirable woman, but I was dismayed by her carping last week about the possible damage to the Phoenix Park that next August’s Papal Mass might cause. Yes, astonishingly, the footfall of hundreds of thousands of people might indeed play havoc with the turf and the walkways in a public park. But as well as being Christians and maybe even Catholics, for their sins, they’ll also be taxpayers whose funds maintain public places, such as that park, for the benefit of the public. And if an event is important enough to draw them there in huge numbers, then that is what they have funded it for, and that is exactly where they are entitled to be, without anyone complaining about the cost of the clean-up – which, by the way, they’ll end up paying too.

And all the signs, so far, are that the Pope’s visit next August will indeed draw crowds to his Masses in numbers that might just surprise the PC, virtue-signalling, Church-bashing trendies in the safety of their social-media mobs. It will be a very different event to the last Papal visit, when every household and every family in the country was represented at one or other of Pope John Paul II’s appearances. When Bishop Eamonn Casey and Fr Michael Cleary did the ‘warm-up’ gig for John Paul II in Galway, there was no predicting how their own secrets would emerge to exemplify the mendacity, the betrayals, the hypocrisy and the smug, entitled arrogance that would dismantle the faith of our fathers, and its unquestioning dominance in our lives, within a few short years.

But the stories, the treasures, the convictions that survive in the ruins are all the more valuable and sturdy for that: Over Easter, by chance, I stumbled upon a short drama series on BBC Radio 4. The Irish accent of narrator Damien Molony drew me in, but then the story hooked me. It was a first-hand account by Judas Iscariot, bringing to life those few days that changed the course of humanity: the clash of swords, the rattle of chains, the crackle of torches and the rustle of bushes in a scented, twilight garden, the crowing of a cock, the traitor’s motivation, disbelief and suicidal remorse, the first hazy flickers of epochal enormity. What a story, and what a message – whoever you believe he was, you can’t imagine that carpenter’s son condemning innocent children for the circumstances of their birth, or dumping their emaciated bodies in a stinking pit. But you could easily imagine him, whoever he was, weeping at the thought of it.