Michael Kelly
The Stoic philosopher Epictetus observed almost 2,000 years ago that “it is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows”. I’ve thought about it a lot over the last week regarding the reaction to the mother and baby report.
Some newspaper columnists have called on Judge Yvonne Murphy’s report to be set aside because – based on the evidence the commission heard – it does not come to the conclusion that was popularly assumed.
One columnist within seconds of the almost 3,000-page document being released said it ‘revealed’ that Ireland had been controlled by a “Catholic Stasi” – a reference to the ruthless secret police of communist East Germany.
Nuanced
The report, of course, is a much more nuanced and sober reading of the evidence as one would expect from Judge Murphy and her fellow commissioners. What seems to have irked those critical of their work is the fact that blame is shared around between the Church, the State, wider society and families.
Many people seem reluctant to accept that the blame could also lie closer to home. It is easier (and less painful) to think of the past as the one-dimensional story of a wicked Church and a subservient State doing as it was told.
Senator Regina Doherty has gone so far as to call for an ‘independent review’ of the work of the commission – a ‘report on the report’ if you like. It appears to have escaped Senator Doherty that the commission was itself an independent review headed in Ms Justice Murphy by a woman who showed steely determination in her investigation of abuse in the Dublin Diocese. Would Mrs Doherty propose hiring another judge and historians to go through the same evidence and interview the same witnesses in the hope they would come to a different conclusion? What if they didn’t? Would we keep having reports until it had a conclusion that accorded with the preconceived views of some newspaper columnists?
At a deeper level, the report of the commission cannot be a moment for Catholics and the institutional Church to cast the net of blame so wide that there is no serious reflection on what went wrong with Catholicism.
Sometimes we protest that people hold the Church to a higher standard than, say, social workers. Good, I say. As Catholics we are custodians of an eternal truth that each and every person is made in God’s image and likeness hallowed by the fact that Jesus became flesh. When people acting in the name of the Church mistreat people in their care it is a rejection of their unique dignity as someone created in God’s image. It is also a betrayal of the Gospel judgement of Matthew Chapter 25 that “in as much as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me”.
“We were all the same,” is a pretty pathetic moral standard for people who calibrate their lives by the Gospel to set for themselves. In articulating the high ideals that Christians do, it should be in the knowledge that these ideals are reachable and that we are judged inasmuch as we do not reach them.
Archbishop Eamon Martin in his forthright apology was right to accept unreservedly the Church’s failure to stand with and for the most vulnerable when they needed it most. That failure casts a heavy shadow over both the Church and society. In our own reflection as Catholics on these failings, and how we allowed the beauty and truth of the Gospel to be obscured by pettiness and stigmatising, we can help hold a mirror to wider society and help others reflect on their complicity.
But, this will not be achieved by trying to deflect the blame elsewhere. We should not be afraid to confront how the Faith is often inadequately lived.
Holy and Sinful
As Henri Nouwen puts it: “The Church is holy and sinful, spotless and tainted. The Church is the bride of Christ, who washed her in cleansing water and took her to himself ‘with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless’” (Ephesians 5:26-27).
“The Church,” he goes on, “too is a group of sinful, confused, anguished people constantly tempted by the powers of lust and greed and always entangled in rivalry and competition.
“When we say that the Church is a body, we refer not only to the holy and faultless body made Christ-like through baptism and Eucharist but also to the broken bodies of all the people who are its members. Only when we keep both these ways of thinking and speaking together can we live in the Church as true followers of Jesus,” Fr Nouwen wrote.
In the Church’s liturgy when one is instituted as a lector he (or following the Popes recent reform, now she) is presented with the scriptures with the words: “Receive the Gospel of Christ, whose herald you have become. Believe what you read, teach what you believe, and practice what you teach”.
This must be our yardstick.
