Homily for Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
I made the following rather obvious prediction in the Parish Bulletin last Sunday: 'With the Ferns Report pending, this week should prove to be a difficult one for the Catholic Church.' How about that for a slight understatement!! Tuesday was certainly the Day of Judgment. The opening words of the old Dies Irae came to mind:
"Day of wrath, day of mourning,
See fulfilled the prophet's warning;
Heaven and earth in ashes burning."
With the publication of that report, skeletons seemed to tumble from the ecclesiastical cupboards, and we can be quite sure that there are similar skeletons in the cupboards of every diocese and religious order in the country. It mattered little that many of these skeletons are now 30, 40, 50 60 years. If a child is damaged, the age or generation in which the crime was perpetrated is irrelevant. In fact, old adages do not apply here: in these instances time is irrelevant, because it most certainly does not heal!
I detected a great (and understandable) reluctance on the part of many parishioners in the aftermath of the report to mention the matter at all. It is like the proverbial reaction to the car-crash: our first reaction is to walk away fast. I made a conscious effort to attend to my own reaction to this sordid scenario. The fact that pastors turned predators tends to mine veins of deep shame in many of us priests. But it also triggers feelings of betrayal and barely controlled fury. How in the name of God did those fellows fall so infernally short of the priestly ideals they (and we) embraced so enthusiastically at the beginning? How could there men, who in their pastoral profession must have been witnesses to raw human suffering, how could they have inflicted such suffering on such vulnerable innocent people. We are all familiar with sin. But these heinous crimes fall into a category of their own.
That reaction was spontaneous on my part. But, on reflection, I don't think it either healthy or helpful. In fact it is self pity masquerading under a number of guises. And, as always happens where self pity intrudes, perspective disappears and the real issues fall out of focus.
There is one primary issue only, and some very, very secondary ones. The primary issue: that the lives of hundreds (perhaps thousands) of innocent children were destroyed by priests who purported to care for them. That is THE central issue. All others issues, such as damage to the church and its personnel, these are secondary and, in a sense, irrelevant on this day. However, to speak of closure at this stage is hopelessly premature. The consequences of these crimes will reverberated in all our souls for many years to come.
These unfortunate kids were victimised on the double: by the original crime and by the subsequent cover-up. In many instances, they were even led to believe that they were the criminals! Our self pity is entirely misplaced. Instead, humility, repentance and honest are called for. Disillusionment will obviously play a more prominent role in our lives, and particularly the lives of Priests today than it did last Sunday. But this disillusionment must be subsumed into our priesthood and carried about by us into our pastoral dealing with the people. Humiliation can, through support and prayer, flower into humility. Padraig Daly has, in his poetry down the years, captured that aspect of priesthood, disillusionment developing into humility. I will read you two of them this morning, their application to present circumstances will be immediately obvious:
The Last Dreamers
We began in bright certainty :
Your will was a master plan
Lying open before us.Sunlight blessed us,
Fields of birds sang for us,
Rainfall was your kindness tangible.But our dream was flawed;
And we hold it now,
Not in ecstasy but in dogged loyalty,Waving our tattered flags after the war,
Helping the wounded across the desert.
The River
"Then he brought me back to the door of the temple: and behold, water was issuing from below the threshold of the temple toward the east" (EzekieI47,1)
The river from God's great city,
Carrying life to every desert place,
Gladdening the roots of trees,
Thrilling the hearts ofbirds,
Runs slurry-grey.Dead fish float there:
Fish hued as rainbows;
Innocent fish, born to the flow,
Trusting the flow.Small children sob in the night:
Their faces cloud the dawn.
Images of hardfaced women unsettle our waking,
Of men, cloaking devastation with counterfeit solicitude.Side by side with them
We built Your Body up,
Channels of living water,
Conduits of unfaltering grace.We cannot disown them
Now the dream is dead.
Scandalised by ourselves,
We lose faith in You.The river from God's great city
Runs slurry-grey:
Deadly its flow.But it is Your face before us
In the broken face of the world,
In the hard faces of our shame,
In the face of each tormented child.