Michael Kelly ‘Pope must make time to meet abuse victims’
IGAVE a talk in a parish recently and a man approached me afterwards. He was blunt. “When will the leadership of the Church stop embarrassing us Catholics?” he asked. He went on to explain that he is in his late 40s and tries his best to live his faith. None of his brothers or sisters go to Mass apart from Christmas and Easter. At work, he is the only practising Catholic and dreads when a story comes on the radio about the Church’s mishandling of one thing or another or a bishop is reported as saying something foolish.
It isn’t necessarily that his colleagues are hostile to his Catholic faith, he says, but time and again he feels that the carpet is pulled out from under his feet by the mis-rule of those who run the Church, as friends and colleagues ask him ‘why?’ and he has no answer.
He’s not the first hard-pressed lay Catholic who has spoken to me in similar terms all across Ireland over recent years, and I thought about him this week when the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, hinted that the Pope might not have time to meet survivors of abuse while in Ireland.
When asked how Francis plans to address the issue of abuse during his August 25-26 trip to Ireland, Dr Martin was reported as saying: “He will obviously speak about various forms of abuse, not just clerical abuse, the abuse in the institutions, the laundries and the mother and baby homes.
“It would be great to meet some of the victims or survivors from that group, but the time is very tight.”
The archbishop went on to add that he had received no definitive response from the Vatican as to whether or not Pope Francis would meet abuse survivors.
It’s hard to contemplate that the Vatican could be so tone deaf as not to know that a meeting with abuse survivors is an absolute must during a papal visit to Ireland.
The fact that no definitive response has been forthcoming to the archbishop’s request is troubling and indicates a worrying lack of understanding of the depth of the wound the abuse scandal has inflicted on Ireland.
Taken along with a seeming inability to once and for all deal with the issue of abuse, it also raises questions about how serious Pope Francis takes the issue.
Right now he is failing and people are starting to notice and ask questions about his commitment on the issue which threatens to engulf his papacy and do lasting damage to Francis’s own reputation.
He was elected five years ago with an ambitious reform agenda. His predecessor, Benedict XVI, was increasingly isolated and, unable to take decisive control of the Church, stepped down.
The cardinals gave the Argentine pontiff a blank canvas to push reforms and he hand-picked a group of nine cardinal advisers to help him, known as the C9. Now, two of these very advisers are tainted by the abuse scandals.
In Australia, Cardinal George Pell – who the Pope tapped to lead a much-needed reform of Vatican finances – is standing trial accused of abuse (he denies the charges), while another archbishop has just stepped down having been found guilty of failing to report allegations of abuse.
In the US, one of the world’s most-famous clerics, Theodore McCarrick, has resigned from the College of Cardinals in disgrace amidst allegations of both child abuse and decades of sexual exploitation of trainee priests.
None of these crises is of Francis’s making and the majority of the cases are historical, but the Pope has shown little appetite to grasp the nettle.
If anything, things appear to have gone backwards.
SHORTLY after his election, Francis appointed a Commission on the Protection of Minors to advise him on the critical action needed to restore trust and confidence. After two years of tireless work, Irishwoman and abuse survivor Marie Collins eventually resigned from the commission warning that the issues was not being taken seriously enough.
Earlier this year, the head of the abuse commission, Cardinal Seán O’Malley, was left trying to apologise for his boss after the Pope accused victims of abuse in Chile of slandering the priest who abused them.
Ireland, probably more than any other country, has been blighted by abuse scandals and the ineffective response of Church leaders.
The Murphy Report into abuse handling in the Dublin diocese exposed a culture where the abuse of children was minimised in a bid to protect the reputation of the Church. At the time, the hierarchy conceded that this was a culture that was widespread within the Church.
Francis needs to address this issue and he needs to do so decisively while he is in Ireland.
Acknowledging that it happened and apologising for the abuse is not enough – he must expose the culture of elitism and clericalism which allowed it, and show what he’s doing to ensure that culture can never arise again.
Around 2,000 journalists – many of them from overseas – have registered to cover the short trip to Ireland. No amount of careful scheduling or handwringing about a lack of time will hide the gaping hole that a failure to meet survivors will represent.
Why, the question will be asked, does the Pope have time to meet foreign ambassadors based in Dublin, but not those who have suffered so grievously?
Such a failure would be first and foremost an insult to the survivors themselves, but it would also be an affront to the Irish people, as well as a betrayal of the trust that so many Catholics hopeful for a purified Church have placed in Francis.
Marie Collins tweeted yesterday to say that if the Pope is not meeting survivors during his visit to Ireland, it is unlikely due to lack of time. “More like an effort to avoid the issue of abuse as the crisis grows worldwide.
“No amount of ignoring will make it go away!”
She’s right, and if Francis and his key advisers don’t know that they really are asleep at the wheel. Catholics who feel so let down really do deserve more.
Failure would be an insult to survivors and be an affront to the Irish people, as well as a betrayal of trust