FROM THIS WEEK’S ISSUE OF THE TABLET, RELIGION MAGAZINE
We’ve learnt that the abuse of children happens across institutions and religious organisations, not only in the Church. But for Catholics there is not just horror and shame that our parishes were places where children were not safe from predatory priests, and anger at the shoddy way our bishops often put the reputation of the Church ahead of caring for the victims and survivors, but a nagging concern that there might be habits and ways of thinking woven into Catholic life and culture which acted as seedbeds for a catastrophe.
Over the past three years a small team of researchers from Durham University’s Centre for Catholic Studies has been investigating if systemic factors have been complicit in how abuse happened and how the response to it was often so inadequate. Unsurprisingly, they have found that cultures of clericalism, habits and attitudes that isolate priests and assume they can do no wrong are implicated. Endemic problems such as secrecy, poor communication and the absence of visible practical structures of accountability to counter clericalist habits come into fresh perspective when viewed through the lens of the abuse crisis. The harm done, as Pope Francis says, calls for “a continuous and profound conversion of hearts”.
The report explores what might be reparative most of all for victims and survivors but also for the whole ecclesial body.
The work of restoration does not dissolve the harm, but acknowledges its impact and, where appropriate, accepts accountability.
“The abuse crisis reveals us to ourselves as a sinful and wounded body,” one of the authors of the report, Pat Jones, writes in this week’s issue.
“There is no other Church but all of us, together, seeking the grace of forgiveness and the courage to own responsibility. This does not undermine the necessary legal and financial redress to which victims are entitled. Rather it offers a further and different possibility. We can become a repairing Church if we face into this experience and accept what it asks of us.”
The Durham report points out where the footholds are that will get us out of this hole, but not everyone is convinced there is a widespread appetite among the bishops to use them: the words “clericalism” and “synodality” still often meet reflex denial and resistance, in this generation of leaders at least and, many fear, in the next one. But Tablet readers have long been used to living in the hope of a modest change of direction in the generation after that.
The concerns Pat Jones and her fellow researchers identify are at the fore of the short talks the Czech philosopher and fellow-priest Tomáš Halík gave each day this week to the 300 parish priests from around the world who were meeting in Rome to share their experiences of synodality. We publish extracts from them in this week’s Tablet. “Priesthood is experiencing a time of trial,” he writes. “Crises challenge us to change. They show us that we can no longer continue on our current path in our thinking, living, and working style. Pope Francis dared to see and publicly admit that the abuse scandals were not just a failure of individuals but a symptom of the illness of the whole Church system. Jesus called it ‘the leaven of the Pharisees’; Pope Francis calls it ‘clericalism’. Clericalism is a worldly, power-centered understanding and exercise of spiritual authority. We priests are not called to be the ‘ruling class’ in the Church but the servants of all.”