There were two words that Cardinal Seán Brady said on Paddy’s Day about his and his church’s disgraceful conduct over the years that made me sit up and take notice: “wounded healer”.

The Lord is calling us to a new beginning. None of us knows where that new beginning will lead. Does it allow for wounded healers, those who have made mistakes in their past to have a part in shaping the future?
The archetype of Chiron, the wounded healer, from classical mythology, has a particular resonance for me. Brady was, no doubt, referencing the work of writer and pastor Henri Nouwen, whose 1979 book “The Wounded Healer” drew on that ancient symbolism and reframed it in Catholic/Christian terms to encourage a perspective on ministry that drew on a priest’s own sense of woundedness in order to relate to those in his pastoral care. It’s a far more humane way of exercising authority, braver, and more effective in the long run. People trust in their leaders more if they’re fallible, as long as they admit it and apologise for it. Ultimately, it takes awareness of one’s own hurts and failings to be empathic and effective as a leader of any kind, but especially spiritual.
When pushed to admit to a spiritual world view, I’m a pagan at heart, albeit chaotic; I conform to no fixed credo. I do believe, however much I detest what Catholicism stands for, that having a faith of some kind does offer peace of mind: a philosophical road map that helps get one through the shittiness of life. And I don’t mean organized religion, per se. Although, a sense of community emanating from people who try to be kind to each other and reflect on life’s mysteries in a non-judgmental way is, of course, a good thing. However, I suspect I could never settle into anything that called itself a congregation.
Like many people, I’ve found the more recent revelations about clerical child abuse cover-ups appalling. Not only Brady’s, but Ratzinger’s, who, similarly, failed to report a child rapist to the police. Both cases point to institutional rot – Brady’s because the culture of obedience was so strong he actually believed he had behaved correctly, and Ratzinger’s because of the job he holds now. Brady can’t resign because it would obviously set a precedent, that the Pope would have to follow. And the only way the papal ring will be taken from that malevolent homophobic Inquisitor is from his cold, dead hand.
His letter to the Catholics of Ireland is masterful in avoiding personal or institutional responsibility, unlike Brady’s vivid mea culpa. “I know that many of you are disappointed, bewildered and angered by the way these matters have been handled by some of your superiors,” Ratzinger writes. As if he himself was not one of them! The pained pontiff sorrowfully brings himself to examine the pitiful state the Irish have gotten themselves into. He refers to “a misplaced concern for the reputation of the Church and the avoidance of scandal” – when he himself was directly – one could say aggressively – responsible for enforcing this policy. “I openly express the shame and remorse that we all feel,” he says, neatly sidestepping the issues over which he should feel personally ashamed. There is none of the transformative symbolism of the wounded healer there, then.
These events simply add fuel to my already blazing indignation against the hypocrisy of the church – but they change nothing of my opinions. I’ve been proved right all along, and I can be very smug and self-righteous about it if I allow myself to be. Call me intrinsically morally disordered, will you? Take that.
Brady’s words did soften me a little, however; he did make me think a little about polarization, about judgmentalism, about hate – the difficult stuff. His shame, publicly confessed, is very important, because, in the past, shame was liberally laid by Catholic clergy on everyone else. The countless single mothers cast into it, the legions of gay people drowned in it, the armies of children suffocated with it for daring to think for themselves, daring to challenge the poisonous self-hatred they were being taught about themselves and their bodies.
It is right, now, once and for all, that the Irish church owns its shame and sits in it for a while – the authentic kind, not the tokenistic papal bull. I say this not out of a sense of schadenfreude, but simply because it is necessary. We are all human on this small island, and doing the best we can. The pernicious scapegoating mechanism that the Catholic clergy used to keep control over the masses has now broken irrevocably, and the spring has coiled back, at last. At long last.
It is only when a man like Brady speaks of his own shame, that he then becomes someone with whom it is possible to dialogue. The finger pointing can stop. For a short while, at least. The invocation of the symbol of the wounded healer lowers the temperature, allows some serious thinking to be done. It of course is Christ-like, who of course has been forgotten in all this slavish obedience to Rome. The more I think of it, the more I know in my bones that Jesus was a gay man, partnered with the disciple “whom he loved”. Why else didn’t he marry? (Blasphemy cheque is in the post.)
I have written before about how I don’t believe in the concept of evil. However, the notion that evil is the absence of empathy has been raised recently, and that makes sense to me on a deep level. Interestingly, it was an army psychologist assigned to watching the defendants at the Nuremberg trial, Captain G. M. Gilbert, who first came up with it, in his quest to try to understand evil.
The correlation between Nazi and Catholic crimes against humanity has been made before. The defence of “only following orders” was debunked in Nuremberg, and it has to be debunked now by Brady and others. It is the culture of obedience in the Catholic church that lies at the heart of its current toxicity. Because it innoculates its servants against empathy – or, more crucially, acting on it. Despite hearing personally from abused children about what Fr Smyth had done to them, Fr Brady was so institutionalised he could not see that he had a moral responsibility to act on the children’s behalf and prevent such crimes from recurring to others. He was not outraged enough to follow Smyth’s movements and career, to sniff around and worry about what he was up to. It wasn’t his job. He wasn’t agitated enough to pester his superiors or question their actions, their authority. He knew his place. I imagine if he did kick up a stink at the time, he would not be Cardinal now. That’s how institutions – of all kinds – weed out the radicals, the trouble-makers, the whistle-blowers. It’s how they survive.
The absence of women in the Church must also play a part in this – not to mention the absence of real fathers. If there were enough of either group in the institution over the past five or six decades, it is inconceivable that the cover-ups could have been allowed to happen.
Given Brady’s track record as a young man, he is unlikely to pull the rabbit out of the hat and make the church relevant again to modern Ireland – he could only do so by breaking the Irish church away from Rome, bringing women and married men in to the clergy, allowing all the gay priests to come out, and voluntarily renouncing all state privileges, preferring to lead morally and spiritually by example, instead of by diktat. It would not persuade me back personally, but it would be an exciting and brave new beginning for the majority of people on this island.
Of course nothing will change in the longer term with Catholicism, as evidenced in the tone of the Pope’s letter. There’ll be a few chairs rearranged on the deck, but the damage done to the Irish Church is ultimately fatal. It’s only a matter of time; the iceberg slipped past and did its damage aeons ago. Brady may reduce the inflammation and bring some healing, by admitting to being human, but no young Irish men will want to be priests anymore. I’m not sure how well it will survive when priests in Ireland are all Filipino or African or Mexican, missionaries trying to sell an outdated moral code to the heathen, liberal Irish. Foreigners in Ireland telling us how to live our lives? We’ve been there before.