The Pope: atoning for the Church’s sins?
Ireland experienced its second visit by a serving pope last weekend, said Fintan O’toole in The Guardian – and what a contrast it was to the first. When John Paul II visited the republic in 1979, over 80% of its inhabitants still attended weekly mass. Some 1.25 million people, a third of Ireland’s population at the time, flocked to Dublin’s largest park for the papal mass. Today, weekly mass attendance is about 35%, and only 200,000 or so people gathered to hear Pope Francis preside over mass at the same spot. While most Irish people were still glad to welcome Francis, his two-day visit was overshadowed by anger over the Catholic Church’s systematic covering up of child abuse by priests, and its past cruel treatment of “fallen” women and children born out of wedlock. Francis begged forgiveness for the “open wound” of clerical abuse and pledged to be “firm and decisive” in pursuit of justice.
“This was a difficult visit for the Pope,” said The Times. But the case of Ireland should serve as a useful spur for reform in the Church. A republic that was once completely in thrall to “an ultra-conservative priesthood” is rapidly shedding its Catholicism. In recent years, it has legalised divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion, and elected an openly gay premier. The lesson for the Church is that it should embrace rather than oppose change, and try to “lead social reform rather than lag behind” it.
It’s not just the Church’s moral authority that is in question in these scandal-racked days, said Tim Stanley in The Daily Telegraph. So, too, is “the Pope’s own fragile reputation as an agent of change”. The media had great hopes for Francis as a reformer, yet his handling of the clerical child abuse crisis has been less than assured. Worse than that, he stands accused of covering up the crimes of one of the Church’s “most senior and sinister sex abusers”, said Damian Thompson in The Spectator. Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s retired ambassador to the US, claimed in a “devastating” 11-page testament published last week that he warned Francis in 2013 that Cardinal Theodore Mccarrick, the disgraced former Archbishop of Washington, was a serial abuser who had been ordered by the former pope to withdraw to a life of prayer and penance. Yet Francis, he says, nevertheless made Mccarrick one of his most trusted advisers. Admittedly, Viganò is a hardliner with an axe to grind. But if he is shown to be telling the truth, it could bring Francis’s papacy to “a spectacular and disastrous end”.