| yolland |
02-13-2011 11:06 PM |
Really interesting, albeit long, article in this week's NYT magazine about the Church's sex-abuse scandals in Ireland, and the enormity of their implications for Irish culture and society:
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[Irish] politics at the beginning of the [20th] century centered on two debates: British rule and religion. There were those—like the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the poet William Butler Yeats—who thought that the potential break with England constituted an occasion for Ireland to cut the strings to the Catholic Church and to embrace a progressive, international sensibility. Others wrapped Irish patriotism together with Catholicism, agrarian traditions and the Gaelic language, and they won the day. Eamon De Valera, the political leader, drafted a constitution side by side with the all-powerful archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, which gave the Catholic Church a special role in state affairs and which to this day begins with the words, “In the name of the most holy trinity.” Thus the 20th-century image of “Irishness” came into being: rural, charming, locked in an eternal, tragicomic struggle with the church. The archbishops of Dublin became something like grand inquisitors, wielding great power. The church’s heavy influence on Irish society kept the wider world at bay for a surprisingly long time. Eamon Maher told me that in the 1970s, his parents found it profoundly disorienting when the evening recitation of the rosary suddenly had to compete with American shows like 'Dallas,' and “the world of wealth, flash cars and extramarital affairs.” Contraception was illegal in Ireland as recently as 1980, and until 1985 condoms were available only with a prescription.
As secularism advanced in other parts of the world, successive popes relied on Ireland as a bulwark and pushed Irish leaders to keep the church in the country’s structure. In 1977, Prime Minister Garret FitzGerald noted that in a private meeting, Pope Paul VI stressed to him “that Ireland was a Catholic country—perhaps the only one left—and that it should stay that way” and that he should not “change any of the laws that kept the republic a Catholic state.” That continues to this day, according to Ivana Bacik, a senator for the opposition Labor Party who has been a leader in the effort to extricate the church from the state. As she put it, “In no other European nation—with the obvious exception of Vatican City—does the church have this depth of doctrinal involvement in the affairs of state.”
According to Abbot Hederman, the hierarchy of the church in Ireland believed that the nation had a special role as a kind of citadel of Catholicism: “Ireland was meant to be the purest country that ever existed, upholding the Catholic ideal of no sex except in marriage and then only for procreation. And the priest was to be the purest of the pure. It’s not difficult to understand how the whole system became riddled with what we now call a scandal but in fact was a complete culture. Because you had people with no understanding of their sexuality, of what sexuality even was, and they were in complete power.” The sexual mistreatment and corporal punishment that went along with the code of purity were hidden in plain sight all along. A careful reader of James Joyce’s “Dubliners” knows this is part of Ireland’s cultural past, but violence in church-run schools was tolerated late into the 20th century. The novelist Colm Toibin, who was in a Christian Brothers school until age 15, told me: “At times it didn’t feel like there was a line between sexual abuse and corporal punishment. Every Friday one of the brothers would take a boy in front of the class, and whichever way he hit you he’d always put his hand on your testicles. We would laugh, but in fact you were in a permanent state of fear. I would vomit in the morning before going out to school. They would hit you across the face if you got a sum wrong. I suppose they did teach me to read and write and that I should be grateful, but I’m not.”
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In Ireland the stakes for the Vatican are tangible. The abuse reports have led to popular demands that the state disentangle the Catholic Church from the country’s infrastructure. More than 90% of primary schools are under church patronage—even though they are state-financed—so that parents generally have no choice but to place their children in a school with what is called a Catholic ethos. Most public hospitals are also controlled by the church, which means that certain procedures that would be commonplace elsewhere have been problematic in Ireland. These include not just abortions—which in December the European Court of Human Rights decreed that Ireland must permit in cases where a woman’s life is at risk—but also vasectomies, among others.
Nonetheless, Ireland is the first country to bring the force of its federal government to bear against the church, according to Thomas Doyle, a Dominican priest who was once a canon lawyer for the Vatican embassy in the US and later represented sexual-abuse victims and also served as an expert consultant to the Irish investigations. “There have been three commissions in Ireland, and all were government funded, all chaired by judges,” he says. “In other places with a traditional Catholic presence and where there has been sexual abuse, there is intense interest in what is going on in Ireland. Quebec has now begun an investigation. There are signs of it beginning in the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Italy, Spain and France.” Ireland, then, provides a model for investigative legal action on a host of fronts.
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In proportion to its population, Ireland easily ranks as the country with the most reported cases of sex abuse within the church. It is second only to the United States in the total number of cases, despite a population approximately one-hundredth that of the US. Of the two reports published in 2009 detailing the findings of civil investigations, the so-called Ryan Report examined abuse in institutions that were run by the Catholic Church, while the Murphy Report detailed abuse within the Diocese of Dublin. The reports fill five volumes and run more than 2500 pages. Sample entries from the Murphy Report include an account of a priest who digitally raped a girl during confession and then washed his hands in a bowl at the altar; a priest who probed a girl vaginally and anally with a crucifix; and a priest who routinely forced altar boys to drop their pants and beat them and then masturbated. The Ryan Report entries that detail the desolate existence of the mostly poor children in so-called industrial schools read like a cross between Charles Dickens and Dan Brown: “I was beaten and hospitalized by the head brother and not allowed to go to my father’s funeral in case my bruises were seen” and “I was tied to a cross and raped while others masturbated at the side.”
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As impressive as the decline in Irish Church statistics has been, the 40% or so of Irish Catholics who go to Mass regularly outpaces some other once-traditionally Catholic countries. Clearly a lot of Irish want a faith community. But what kind, and under what conditions?
The Rev. Tony Flannery, an organizer of the Association of Catholic Priests, told me he recently attended meetings about the future of the church with members of a rural parish. “These were Irish people of 60, 70, 80 years of age,” he said. “And I was amazed at the radical nature of what they were saying. They want women more involved. They want to take their church back from Rome. The child-abuse business has shaken the Catholic Church structure here in a way I would never have felt possible in my lifetime. So for the likes of me, that’s an upside to all that has happened. There’s an openness now, among priests and laity.” I asked him if he thought the openness extended in any way into the hierarchy, and he laughed. “Oh, no,” he said, “no indication of that at all.”
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That quote from Abbot Hederman is interesting, if a bit improbable-sounding--is he suggesting that the Vatican literally, intentionally shaped Ireland to be some sort of designated sexual-repression learning laboratory? or more that this was a kind of national-pride myth that Irish clergy collectively told themselves? But, what really caught my eye about it was that it's the only passage in the article which appears to take a stab at explaining how such an extreme and pervasive culture of sadism and brutality, transmitted through Church institutions, managed to take root in this particular country--above and beyond the now globally familiar theme of celibacy-as-status-symbol tending to attract pedophiles. |