A pledge by the Pope to punish those who covered up abuse may hold the key to Church’s redemption

FOR the Irish Catholic Church, this weekend is truly momentous. Thirtynine years after the last Papal visit when the wildly popular Pope John Paul II brought the entire country to a standstill, this weekend’s event may be more modest in scale but it unleashes a more complex range of emotions than 1979 when the pendulum of public sentiment swung in the main from benign indifference to ecstatic reverence.

At the Phoenix Park where Mass is celebrated today by Pope Francis, aided by a stately procession of priests and bishops, the public response to the display of church majesty is decidedly more mixed.

Milestone occasions, be they personal or public, are invariably bittersweet; they elicit joy tinged with sadness, hope for the future and regret for the past and the Papal visit is no different.

As Pope Francis blesses the faithful he knows that the collective catharsis that spills forth every time he appears in St Peter’s Square is far from guaranteed. His advisers will have told him that the Irish response to Saint Peter’s successor will be as varied as the make-up of the flock before him.

For among the hundreds of thousands corralled around the Papal Cross today, not to mention those who watch proceedings from their homes, there are the truly devout who cling doggedly to the tenets of their faith, come what may, and reward Pope Francis with a hero’s welcome.

There are also the swelling ranks of à la carte Catholics who follow their own conscience rather than Church dogma in moral matters and who cleave to the Church out of a transcendental longing.

There are the many souls who feel bitterly betrayed by Church scandals and corruption and who look to this major ecclesiastical event with ambivalence and the faint hope that it might renew their faith.

And there is the multitude who bear a great hostility to an institution that they believe for too long exerted a harsh and unyielding grip on Irish life, and whose entire edifice should be torn to the ground.

THERE are many reasons why the Irish flock, once a solid mass of at the very least outward piety and religious observance, has splintered so dramatically. The horror of clerical sex abuse and the scandal of the cover-up has cast a dark shadow over the religion, wounding its followers and accelerating their alienation from the institutional Church.

It is a moral catastrophe whose tremors are felt through every layer of the church.

As the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, said last Sunday at the Pro-Cathedral the scandal had produced deep-seated resentment among believers and anger at the role of Church leadership in compounding the suffering of many in institutions for children, unmarried mothers and vulnerable women.

Yet for all that, 78% of people identified as Catholic in the last census, an extraordinary figure that shows the Church still comPennsylvania manding a hold on the Irish psyche. It also belies both the continual decline in Mass attendance figures and the passing of liberal referendums which lost the country its niche as the last outpost of traditional Catholicism in the West. The popular vote for marriage equality and for abortion, in the latter case in defiance of one of Catholicism’s most fundamental teachings, shows how the forces of secularism have replaced Church authority in public life and how religion has retreated into the private arena.

This Papal visit, restrained and relatively low-key, its planning stages overshadowed by controversy and recrimination about clerical sex abuse during which the trauma of abuse survivors seemed to be revived, has carried an expectation that the Pope would address the painful subject.

The idea of an infallible Pope bowing to popular pressure is almost unprecedented and a manifestation of the Church’s reduced standing.

The last decade, punctuated by harrowing reports bearing surnames like Ryan and Murphy, or a placename like Cloyne, told of the systematic torture and brutalisation of Irish children and young women in their own country.

But we are not unique in this. Catholics all over the world have been disgusted by the behaviour of predatory priests in their midst, and the collusion of the Church hierarchy, both at home and in the Vatican, whose instinct for selfpreservation and institutional protection trumped compassion for children. In recent weeks, the report gives nauseating details of the perversions and evil perpetrated on more than 1,000 children in six dioceses in the US state.

Three hundred priests were involved and, as in this country, the response of their superiors was to move offenders around parishes, sweep it under the carpet rather than call in the police.

But addressing the growing clamour for holding both perpetrators of child sexual abuse and those responsible for the cover-up to account is not the only challenge facing the Catholic Church.

Female ordination and the status of gay marriage and LGBT people are issues that for many Catholics must be resolved if the Church’s love of justice and equality is to ring true.

Specific to this country there are questions about the dominance of the Catholic Church in education and its influence over the health service.

Pope Francis’s attendance at the World Meeting of Families has helped highlight these issues, while raising questions about the survival of a church that has been in existence here for almost 1,500 years.

Our history of religious suppression coupled with colonialism helped give the Church an authority that far out-stretched what was envisioned in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic.

After Catholic Emancipation and as Catholics entered public life and advanced in the professions, the faith became as intrinsic to our burgeoning national identity as our native language and culture.

OUR isolated country on the edge of Europe was shielded by geography and the heavy hand of the Catholic hierarchy from foreign influences ranging from communist ideology to the explosive tensions of World War II. But Ireland today is unrecognisable from that insular country of subordinate, often fearful, people; even its similarities with 1979 are fading and the question for a Church that owes so much of its mystique to timeless tradition and unalterable doctrine is how to remain relevant in the life of its flock and secure its future here.

The stultifyingly doctrinaire Church, led by glowering princes of the Church and who treated its flock as cowed supplicants, has no place in modern Ireland.

Neither does a Church that placed protecting the institution of the Church over its duty of pastoral care for its community.

This country deserves a commitment from the Pope that those in the upper echelons in the Church, who aided and abetted the cover-up of abuse, will suffer the consequences for their terrible deceit. A culture of ‘moving on’ a child sex abuser was horrific and ensured the scale of abuse went on undetected for decades. It would be a more powerful gesture that repeated apologies for past failings.

Ultimately the key to the Church’s redemption lies in the eternal Christian message, of love for all of humanity and forgiveness of sin.

Its resonance this weekend lies at the heart of Pope Francis’s visit.