Parish Newsletter

Masses Today

6.30 Coleman & Sabina Cooke, (Anniv).
11.00 Gerry Higgins, (Anniv)
6.30 Michael, Bridget & Pádraig Hanley, (Anniv).

AS I WAS SAYING.....

The Irish bishops have issued a Pastoral on the topic of child sex abuse, 'Towards Healing', which is available in the Church today. (see extract later). The Pastoral makes clear that healing will never be accomplished unless we acknowledge the crime, and strive to understand it (both in its cause and its consequence). We owe it to whose who have been abused not to leave go of this too lightly. Lives have been devastated, destroyed; we shouldn't really complain if we experience mere discomfort in discussing the topic!

Were it not for the media, I don't believe we would ever have learned the sheer extent of the problem of clerical sex abuse. It may stick in the craw of Mother Church, but she owes a huge debt to the media on this account. In this instance at least, the media has exercised a genuinely prophetic role in society. But some obvious questions were passed over: (1) why did or could this abuse take place?; (2) How did it go on for so long? (3) 97% of abusers have been non-clerics (in many instances close relatives of the victims themselves). Has this statistic received the attention it merits? Or has society used clerical abuse as a sort of 'lightning conductor', a welcome diversion from a far more widespread problem? To raise this issue is not to minimise the awful betrayal that child sexual abuse by clerics represents.

The majority of priests earned and received high trust from people in the past. In fact, as every recent survey suggests, a great deal of this trust still remains, despite everything. This was the very trust which prevented people from believing that a priest could harm young people. I believe that the 'old' moral theology was partially to blame. Sexual sin was -first and foremost- 'illicit pleasure'. Moral theologians today would stress the brutal exploitation of the vulnerable victim, rather than the 'illicit pleasure' experienced by the perpetrator. I guess some of these abusers ran off to Confession and purged their consciences of their 'illicit pleasures'; the unfortunate, innocent victim was left to wallow in his or her psychological and spiritual hell.

Predictably, institutions defend themselves against threats to their image of integrity. We have only to look at how boards and councils rush to defend themselves against claims of neglect by their members. All institutions do it either by denial, by delay, or by spin-doctoring. The Church has often fallen for this way of defending its image. It would be ideal if the Church was always perfect; but Jesus said that good seed and weeds will be part of it until the end. Trying to keep the Church looking perfect is always a temptation for its leadership. This leads to hiding the failures of its leaders - as we have recently witnessed. In the effort to hide one serious failure, a still greater failure has become transparent. Can we learn from this?

If active parish councils had existed, decisions would not have been secretly biased in defence of criminal members in the clerical culture. Can we imagine any parent on a parish decision-making body permitting a man against whom there was a sheaf of accusations, to remain in contact with children? Would the average parent have consented to moving an admitted paedophile to another place where he could continue to abuse? However tolerant men might be of this behaviour, women on a parish council would certainly not have remained silent. This is but one example of how impoverished the Church is without the influence of women in its decision-making process.

-Dick Lyng

EVENTS THIS WEEK

TOWARDS HEALING: A LENTEN REFLECTION

As you will gather from the piece I have written (As I was Saying...), the Bishops' Pastoral on Child Abuse, "Towards Healing", is available in the porch of the Church as you leave Masses today. (It seems to bear the unmistakable finger-prints of Bishop Donal Murray of Limerick) Only take one home if you intend reading it! We didn' t get that many of them. The extract below, from the introductory section of the document, will give you a flavour of its tone and its content.

"In recent years the pain of people who suffered sexual abuse as children has at last begun to receive the public attention and understanding it deserves. We bishops, like all members of the Church, are very painfully aware of the dreadful betrayal of trust and the scandalous contradictions that are involved when a child is abused by an adult. This betrayal is vastly greater when that adult is a priest or religious. Instead of being respected and protected by people whom they trusted, the children were used and humiliated and damaged in unthinkable ways.

All of us, bishops, priests, religious and lay faithful have a particular responsibility to learn the deep wrong that has been done to them, to share their pain and to help in their healing. We want to show them that the whole Church community is appalled at what has happened to them and wishes to listen, to understand and to help.

In this reflection, we do not attempt to address every facet of the issue of child sexual abuse. It is our intention to publish further reflections on other aspects of this painful and complex reality. We have learned some lessons. We know there are more that we need to learn."

-(Towards Healing, February, 2005.)

A MODERN-DAY MARTYR

Sr Dorothy Stang, 74, an American-born missionary Sister, was shot dead by two gunmen in Brazil this week. They arrived at a remote forest settlement while she was meeting a group of local farmers on 12 February.

Violence is nothing new on this wild frontier: in 1988, a rubber-tappers' leader, Chico Mendes, whose campaign to protect the rainforest had won him global recognition, was shot dead at the same spot.

The dangerous work of standing up for the poor settlers and native peoples of the Amazon has fallen largely to the field workers of the Catholic Church's Pastoral Land Commission, with whom Sr Stang worked for many years.

She arrived in the early 1980s, and became involved in sustainable agriculture and forestry schemes, teaching peasants using slash-and-burn techniques to conserve resources rather than exhaust them, and helping them to secure legal titles to land that proprietors and their agents were eager to take from them. Last year she received an honorary citizenship award for her work. On Tuesday, thousands of people converged on the remote Amazon town of Anapu for Sr Stang's funeral. After an all-night vigil, mourners filed slowly past her simple coffin, covered with a Brazilian flag inside a small shingle-roofed church. Her body was buried among the poor for whom she gave her life.