Sad to say, there is nothing shocking at all in The Ferns Report. Anyone who has had their antennae tuned to what a significant number of the clergy had been up to in Ireland over the years will have been well aware that there was a cesspit there, waiting to be uncovered.
I’m not just talking about the fact that a herd of monsters in dog collars was on the loose, preying on vulnerable children, imposing their sordid sexual impulses, often in the most bizarre and cavalier manner, on those unfortunate enough to be handed to them on a proverbial silver platter.
No, there was also the awful realization that this fact was well known to those in authority within the Church – and that these self-styled representatives of Christ did nothing to address the problem. On the contrary, they adopted a policy of facilitating the criminals in their midst by protecting them, shunting them around from place to place and in the end sheltering them – whether in monasteries, as happened in the case of the now deceased Fr. Brendan Smyth, or in the Archbishop’s house itself, as happened with Fr. Ivan Payne in Dublin.
Of course, there were and are good priests, people whose intentions have been and are thoroughly decent. But, long before the publication of the Ferns Report, the fact that the poison ran right through the system, from the top down, was perfectly obvious.
The high profile cases that we have read about are just the tip of the iceberg. The problem was endemic not just in Ferns, and not just among priests who were appointed to parishes, but in schools all over Ireland, across every religious order. Even as a kid growing up, you knew it. And yet, everyone in authority seemed to be in denial, including the Gardai, the Health Boards and the members of Dail Eireann.
If there is any shock to the system this week, it is that The Ferns Report suggests that those days of cover-up and denial may finally be a thing of the past. There is still much more to be revealed, especially about what happened in Dublin (See Frontlines, Page 10). But carefully couched in bureaucratic language as it may be, the report is a fierce indictment of the Catholic Church for its failure to address the crime of sexual abuse by priests, and the disgraceful way in which it rubbed the noses of the victims of clerical abuse in the filth thus created.
It is clear that – under duress, it has to be said – the Catholic Church in Ireland is now attempting to address the problem. But I have yet to hear anyone begin to adequately address the essential underlying question: what made it possible for men who were presumed to be moral paragons to descend to the depths of depravity which the treatment of the victims of sexual abuse by the Lords of the Church entailed?
There is something fundamental here, that is at the heart of the so-called moral teachings of the church. What both the reality of widespread sexual abuse by priests, and the softly-softly approach taken to it by almost everyone in authority within the Church (from the Pope down) actually reflects, is the twisted view of anything to do with sex, which is – and remains – a core aspect of Catholic teaching.
The elevation of any kind of active participation in sexual pleasure to the status of sin, if it happens outside the confines of a heterosexual marriage, immediately makes sex an issue for all members of the church (including priests) in a way that it should never be. A teenage girlfriend of mine had a voracious desire for sexual experimentation, which was wonderful. Except that afterwards, she’d inevitably dissolve into floods of tears, wracked with guilt at the fact that she’d “let herself down”.
This sort of fucked-up attitude, which was prevalent here, is a direct product of the association of sexual activity of even the most innocent kind with filth, guilt and sin. The kid who goes on to be a priest has probably been wrestling with guilt about masturbating for years by the time he enters the seminary. But he can’t stop his cock going hard. He can’t stop himself having wet dreams. And he can’t, like my unfortunate seventeen year old girlfriend, stop himself being racked with shame and remorse if he does jerk himself off in the dark of the night.
It seems so blindingly obvious that this is at the heart of the sickness that pervades the Roman Catholic Church that there isn’t even room for debate. Once you turn the sexual impulse into something to be feared and loathed, then you have created a syndrome the inevitable outcome of which is a twisted, distorted manifestation of that same impulse among at least some of those expected to abstain from it completely.
And what is it that underlies this categorisation of sex as sinful in the first place? What arsehole came up with this fucked-up view of the wonderful world of sexual pleasure and fulfilment? What is there to support it in the teachings of Christ?
It is just that: a thoroughly fucked-up view of the world. There is nothing at all wrong with sexual activities of any kind between consenting adults. Nor is there anything wrong with satisfying a sexual craving by engaging in solo sexual gratification. And any moral code that claims otherwise is bound to have the effect of producing the kind of twisted sexual perversions of which so many priests (but, of course, not only priests) have been found to be guilty.
Until the Catholic Church addresses this twisted view of sexuality, and acknowledges that its teaching on the subject has been downright stupid and wrong, it will continue to promote psycho-sexual dysfunction, both among its clergy and within its ‘flock’. It will be part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
World without end. Amen.