There had been an attempt in advance to suggest that the meeting between the Pope and the Irish bishops on the issue of child sexual abuse would be of historic importance. For experienced Vatican watchers, this might have seemed an unlikely outcome – but then there are desperate people out there, who really want to believe in the bona fides of the Roman Catholic Church in relation to all of the filth and muck that clings to the institution like the smell of death.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why, but these well-meaning believers keep hoping that someone in the organisation will definitively do the right thing and thereby open a new chapter. And maybe we shouldn’t mock their optimism. On the face of it, the Pope was now engaged with the issue: this, they felt, was the Church’s big opportunity.
Well, they blew it, in the most predictable, mind-numbingly bland and self-serving way. The bishops and the Vatican were taken aback when representatives of all of the victims’ groups expressed profound disappointment with the statement that was issued from Rome after the ‘historic’ meeting had taken place. You could feel the anger burning through abuse victim Christine Buckley’s every utterance on the RTÉ news. Andrew Madden, another victim, was softer but no less compelling. Some observers were distressed that no further episcopal resignations were in store. Others identified a wider spectrum of failings, of a kind which confirmed that the Bishops just don’t get it. Which, of course, they don’t. Never have. And most probably never will.
The images that were beamed through from Rome were themselves deeply embarrassing. The posse of Irish bishops were dressed in their full episcopal regalia, the ludicrous dresses and the hats on pompous show. They were shown queueing up to kiss the Pope’s ring, a tawdry expression of the hierarchical nature of the organisation – but the Pope and the Bishops are all too blindly wrapped up in their own self-importance to have any sense how others might see this. The smell of sollipsistic old men gathered in conclave was impossible to avoid. But that is part and parcel of what the Church is; indeed it is fundamental to the Roman Catholic religion. Women should run from it like hares from a pack of rabies-infected dogs (and if they did most of the sane men would follow). But instead, an extraordinary number hang around like second-class extras in a movie made by men, for men and about men. Just because that’s what they were weaned on…
I could have written the Pope’s statement in advance myself. It is full of useless cliches masquerading as brave new insights when they are nothing of the sort. Is it meant to be radical that the Pontiff acknowledges that Child Sexual Abuse is a ‘grave sin’, as well as a heinous crime? Is it really a breakthrough that he talked about the Church’s commitment to cooperation with the statutory authorities in Ireland, North and South?
Were he to suggest otherwise, we would have a right to storm the Vatican Bastille and to hang, draw and quarter him.
The truth is that he neither said, nor offered, anything new to Irish victims of clerical abuse. Nor did he treat the occasion as a potential moment of catharsis, a point beyond which the old Church which had facilitated the wholesale and gross abuse of children would be consigned definitively to the dustbin of history. Instead he delivered platitudes about ‘hurt’ and ‘healing’, emphasising instead the hope that the meeting would help to ‘unify the bishops and enable them to speak with one voice’. One suspects that this may have been the real agenda when the bishops were called to Rome: an order to end the dissension that had threatened to tear the Irish church asunder.
What might the Pope or the Bishops have done that they didn’t do? Actually forget the Bishops. The Pope could have stated unequivocally:
(a) that the Church was wrong in not having a policy of going straight to the relevant civil authorities – the Gardaí in Ireland – the first time that any kind of serious allegations were made that a priest was abusing a minor and that, as a result, it was complicit in (and therefore shares guilt for) all of the second, third and multiple cases of abuse perpetrated by individual priests that inevitably followed;
(b) that the Church was clearly negligent in the way it allowed the wholesale abuse of children in a wide variety of institutions, and that this has to be seen as a function of the inherent authoritarianism of the institution itself;
(c) that the church in Ireland and elsewhere was itself guilty of heinous crimes in moving known abusers deliberately from parish to parish and from country to country, in order to stay one step ahead of the law – and that the Vatican accepts full responsibility for the fact that this was a function of the institution’s well-groomed and highly developed instinct for putting self-preservation above any other consideration and was the pervasive culture in the Roman Catholic Church not just in Ireland;
(d) that the widespread cover-up of child sexual abuse engaged in by the Irish bishops was in itself a further crime, and that full responsibility for this is accepted by the Vatican;
(e) that every bishop who facilitated the cover-up, or who knowingly did nothing to help the victims of abuse, or who instead resisted the legitimate claims of victims, would have to immediately forfeit their status in the Roman Catholic Church and revert to the role of being humble priests in the hope that God (assuming they really believe in the existence of a deity) might forgive them, even if that is far too much to ask of the victims themselves;
(f) that the Church is prepared to hand over control of what are currently Catholic schools to the State in Ireland without any encumbrance or reservation whatsoever;
(g) that the Vatican will put a fund in place to properly compensate the victims of clerical child sexual abuse in Ireland (and elsewhere) and that this will be handed over to a completely independent authority to negotiate and administer – and that this will be done, even if it means selling off the treasures that are hidden in the vaults of the Vatican itself.
There is more, of course, that Pope Benedict might have said, but this is the minimum that should be demanded from him and from the Church: that is, a complete acknowledgement of the enormous responsibility they bear for what was done by their employees, operating under their authority and protection, combined with a commitment to full reparation, and co-operation with the civil authorities to the extent of turning over all files on the issue, so that the full level of cover-up can be seen.
There is one other aspect of the statement that was like a red rag. The Pope offered a kind of apologia for the priests who abused innocent children by claiming that their actions were part of a wider loss of respect for the human person and that a weakening of faith had been a significant factor in the phenomenon of abuse of minors.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The actions of the priests who abused children were consistent with the assumption of special status that goes with being a priest; they were intimately entwined with the twisted view of sexuality as something sinful and to be ashamed of that is central to Roman Catholic ideology; and they express the contempt for children which is implicit in the celibate life and the blunt rejection of women and their sexuality, which has for hundreds of years been essential to the functioning of what is a completely male-centred and sexually perverse institution.
I could go on. For the Pope and his creepy Vatican co-conspirators to imply that this has to do with modern so-called ‘permissiveness’ is a sick piece of entirely spurious propagandising which grossly insults the victims of sex abuse – and underlines just how far from being able to acknowledge the truth the lords of the Church really are.