At breakfast yesterday my two-year-old daughter wanted to “read” me the Easter card she got from a relative. “One day, they went in the forest, and then they were finished. The End,” she said, looking up from the card. “Now you read it to me.” So I did. The greeting was:
Easter time is here again
That lovely time of year
When we especially think of those
We hold especially dear
So naturally you’re thought about
And wished the nicest things –
All the special happiness
A joyful Easter brings!
I’m enthusiastic about explaining things to her so I was about to drop a few sentences somehow explaining Easter was really about God, but a thought crossed my mind and stopped me. I have no tolerance left for the Church’s protection of child abusers, its silencing of victims and failure to adequately apologise or explain why it failed to act against paedophiles. Why, I asked myself, should my daughter be exposed to these men in frocks and their beliefs?
For someone raised as a Catholic this is an arresting thought. Even though its dogma is world-renowned it may still be hard to grasp, for anyone not brought up with it, the all-or-nothing way Catholicism requires you to accept, without question, the authority of the Church. Put simply, if you don’t accept the Church you’re not Catholic.
I wanted to hear directly from someone in the Church about what this meant. Fast-forward six hours and I was talking to a priest who suddenly started weeping uncontrollably during a conversation about the good work the Church has done around the world.
Some of that conversation is recounted below but the priest – an outstanding man who I’m not going to identify to spare him the wrath of his bosses – began by telling me what was unfolding was the “messy reality of the human Church”.
This “messy reality” is the human wreckage of decades of institutionalised abuse of children that is now catching up with the Church’s hierarchy. The horrific experiences of Irish children at the hands of clergy have been slowly and tortuously exposed over the past 20 years and this month the process culminated in an apology to victims from Pope Benedict.
But many victims were unhappy with the apology and the Pope himself is now facing what appear to be substantial allegations that he may have failed himself to act on reports of abusers within church ranks. America’s National Catholic Reporter this week declared that the Pope was suffering from a “credibility gap”.
Like most Catholics I know, I’m lapsed and a-la-carte. I’ll skip the main course of Sunday mass and praying, but chalk me down for a handy framework for telling right from wrong, a rule that says treat others as you’d like to be treated and, later, eternal salvation.
I have rarely given it much thought but what seems to be a non-stop flow of abuse allegations, together with the clear disappointment from some Irish victims at the Pope’s apology, suddenly have me wondering if I’m ready to walk away from it all in disgust.
This is what I raised with the priest yesterday afternoon – let’s call him Father David – and told him I had avoided explaining Easter to my daughter. What follows is a summary of our conversation and I’m trying to avoid a retrospective commentary. (I explained at the outset that I was a journalist and planned to write about our conversation.)
We went over some Catholicism 101 and it was a reminder of what a challenging belief system it is. It starts, I was told, with having a personal relationship with Christ and striving to live as He did.
Just as a child might misbehave, he explained, one of God’s children can misbehave. “I can give you this much God, I can’t quite do the rest of it today,” is one way a fairly typical relationship between a believer and God could be characterised. And God, because he loves all his children, will accept what you can manage in return.
The trouble is, I pointed out, that you might be able to have a real and personal relationship with Christ but as a Catholic you must accept the Church and everything about it.
There are some in the Church, he said, that believe all of its teaching deeply and accept it. But many others don’t and on the outer edges of the Church there are people who believe parts of it. Yet they are part of the Church too.
So the Church, Fr David explained, is everyone – with the important distinction that the minority of clergy that inflict abuse are not the Church.
Our conversation turned to the good work that the Church does and his time as a missionary in Africa. This for me is the most dispiriting element of the Church’s current predicament, that such damage has been inflicted by an organisation that has indisputably done so much good.
He had been on several missions in Africa and recalled being kidnapped and held for several days, moving between villages, by gunmen in the Congo in the early 1960s. The hostages were all missionaries – priests and nuns – and they were rescued on New Year’s Eve by mercenaries who broke in through the floorboards of the shack where they were held, surveyed the scene, and left before mounting an assault in which people were shot dead but all the hostages got out.
He wept while talking about one of the nuns who, each New Year’s Eve, spends the day looking at a communion host to give thanks for being saved. “She has done such good work,” he said. “Brought hundreds of people into the world,” he added, referring to her work as a nurse delivering babies.
Specifically on the abuse allegations, he wasn’t claiming to speak for the hierarchy but said he couldn’t see how Pope Benedict could actually have decided to sweep allegations of abuse under the carpet. “I don’t believe he is capable of making the sort of decision to ignore what facts he had in front of him, given what he has said on the matter” he said.
I listened, agonised, as he said that some of the abuse cover-ups may have been bureaucratic problems or misunderstandings of protocol.
A life in the Church was a path that my daughter could take, I explained.
“Don’t deprive her of that,” he said. It would be like never telling her who her family was. Without the Church she would not fully know herself.
My religion – I wouldn’t call it faith – is not something I will take a decision on lightly. Like I said, it has given me a sense of right and wrong, and at some points in my life, comfort.
But this Easter I don’t think I’ll be the only Catholic questioning it.
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