The Cloyne Report: Tackling Prevailing Myths

Part Seven in an Occasional Series
I've found the Irish Times' coverage of the Cloyne Report fascinating, not least because despite the editorial line lauding the Taoiseach's speech to a near-empty Dáil, the paper in general hasn't skimped on articles taking issue with the Government's reaction.

The political correspondent Deaglán de Bréadún has noted that the Government's blustering has been very useful in distracting the people and the papers from its own shortcomings, a view that's shared by an otherwise unemployed columnist; Ian Elliott has pointed out that it was the Church and not the State that uncovered the problems with Magee and O'Callaghan in Cloyne; Breda O'Brien has observed that the State's own child safety failures are even now a cause for serious concern, and has wondered whether we as a nation are genuinely interested in protecting our children; social workers have been reported as arguing that mandatory reporting of abuse could do more harm than good; Gerry Whyte has argued that the seal of the Confessional is already protected under Irish law, and may well be protected under the Constitution; Paddy Agnew has explained that it's wrong to think of the Vatican as a single-minded entity bent on protecting itself no matter what; Vincent Twomey has taken issue with the Taoiseach having defamed the Pope and the Vatican and has, along with Breda O'Brien and John Waters, contested Enda's false claims about the Vatican having supposedly intervened in Irish affairs and attempted to obstruct the Murphy Commission's investigation into Cloyne.

That's not to say that any of these dispute in any respect the findings of the Commission, or that they don't deplore how Magee and O'Callaghan mishandled affairs in Cloyne. Nor is it to say in any way that they deny the horrific reality of such abuse of children as happened in Cloyne or the devastating effects of that abuse. It's merely to say that these people have a grasp on the facts and appear to have actually read the Report for themselves, rather than relying on what other people have said about it. It's well worth reading the Report, because it is being misrepresented. Here's a letter, for instance, from Wednesday's Irish Times, which I think may be the best of the week:

'As a practising Catholic and member of the Fine Gael party, I was inspired by Mr Kenny’s Dáil speech to read the Cloyne report for myself. It soon became embarrassingly clear that Mr Kenny had not done so, and I fear he will come to regret some of his vitriol.

It is my earnest hope that, when the Vatican issues its response to the Government, Mr Kenny takes some time to study it and to respond in a manner befitting An Taoiseach.

The hour requires a statesman, not an opportunist demagogue.'

And indeed, while the papers' letters in the immediate aftermath of the Taoiseach's rant were overwhelmingly in favour of his posturing, day by day it's become clear that people are starting to realise that while we have serious problems with child abuse in Ireland, Enda's opportunistic grandstanding isn't part of the solution. I wonder if this is why Fintan O'Toole, the most gifted, intelligent, and perceptive of the Church's opponents at home has been keeping his mouth shut on this; he's probably smart enough and honest enough to realise that Enda's witterings are neither honest nor helpful.

But I wanted to talk about a piece in Thursday's Irish Times entitled 'Why is Vatican so miffed at reaction to Cloyne report?' which sneers at the Vatican's astonished reaction to how the Irish establishment has responded to the Cloyne Report. This piece seems to have gone down a storm on Twitter, even among people I respect, and indeed there are letters raving about it in today's Irish Times. One correspondent goes so far as to say that a copy of the article should be posted on every fridge in Ireland lest we forget the fine detail. As ever, though, the piece is almost complete fiction. The Questions and Answers format I used for talking about Cloyne the other day seems to have been helpful, so I'll try it again here.


1. Is Rome 'miffed' at 'excessive reactions' to the Murphy Report?
It seems to be. On Monday the vice-director of the Vatican's Press Office, Father Ciro Benedettini, said, among other things, that 'The recalling of the Nuncio, a measure rarely used by the Holy See, denotes the seriousness of the situation, and the desire of the Holy See to deal with it objectivity and with determination, as well as a certain note of surprise and regret regarding some excessive reactions.'

2. What reactions does the Vatican think were excessive?
Well, in the immediate aftermath of the Report, certain prominent Irish politicians talked of rendering illegal in Irish law the Catholic seal of Confession, and in his speech to the Dail last week, the Taoiseach attacked the Vatican for what happened in Cloyne.

3. Wasn't he right to do so?
No, we've been through this. If anything, the problem at Cloyne seems not to have been a slavish obedience to Rome so much as it was an arrogant determination to ignore the opinions of anybody outside County Cork.

4. So how does Patsy McGarry, the author of this article, respond to the 'surprise and regret' the Vatican had expressed?
Well, by an impressively unrelated series of non-sequiturs, in the main, starting with the claim that the Irish State has had to spend €133.8 million over the last few years unearthing what he said was available to Rome all along.

5. And has it?
No. For starters, almost all of that money -- more than €126 million -- was spent on the Ryan Report into abuse in Ireland's industrial schools. These schools, though run by religious orders, were supervised by the Irish State, not by Rome, such that the Report is utterly scathing about the religious orders themselves and the State's historical failure to supervise and inspect schools and institutions for which it was responsible. It in no way even hints that Rome is in any way to blame.

Indeed, as far as I can see through searching through all five volumes of the Ryan Report, the word 'Vatican' is only used seven times, almost invariably in connection with changes necessitated by the Second Vatican Council.  The Report doesn't record that it even bothered to ask the Vatican if it had any information on the subject, as it was obvious that the Vatican lacked this information.

6. I see. So there's no truth in this?
Not if we're using 'Rome' as a synonym for 'Vatican', no. It is true that the Christian Brothers' and the Rosminians' head offices are in Rome, and that there were lots of files there, but aside from these files not being comprehensive, there's no suggestion in the Report that these files were ever handled by the Vatican, despite such religious orders being notionally answerable to the Secretariat of State for the Religious. Look at the Report's conclusions -- it doesn't even vaguely criticise the Vatican, whereas it's pretty damning of the State.

Shall I go on?

7. Please do. What about the Ferns, Murphy, and Cloyne Reports? Did Rome have all the information on them, information that the State had to pay maybe €8 million to rustle up?
I very much doubt it. After all, we know from the Cloyne report that despite there being concerns raised or complaints made about eighteen priests in Cloyne between 1996 and 2009, the Diocese only ever contacted Rome about four of these, in three cases not doing so until 2009. Of the forty-six cases the Murphy Commission considered in Dublin between 1975 and 2004, the Report describes only four as having ever been passed on to Rome. In short, two offical reports based on all the documentation clearly show that Rome did not have all the information on these matters.

8. Right, so the two opening paragraphs are almost wholly fictitious. What of the third one, where he says files on five Ferns priests mysteriously turned up in 2005, when the draft Ferns report was already complete?
This certainly happened, as it seems that the solicitors who'd been hired to find all the files for the Ferns Commission had missed out on a few files that might have been of relevance. In connection with this, the Ferns Commission accepted in an Appendix to the Ferns Report 'that the omission of the documents identified in the course of this further investigation was due to a regrettable error on the part of the Diocese and did not constitute the withholding of cooperation on its part. The Inquiry is satisfied that the cases cited below do not impact on the work done by the Inquiry or on the conclusions or recommendations reached by it.'

9. So, although this did happen, the Commission accepted that this was a genuine error and that it didn't hamper the investigation in any way. Right. So why the sneering at the Pope having declined Bishop Eamon Walsh's 2009 resignation as an auxiliary bishop of Dublin?
I have no idea. The implication is that the Ferns Commission shouldn't have accepted that the belated production of some documents was a genuine error, and was wrong to say that the delayed documents wouldn't have made any difference whatsoever to the Report's findings, something that itself implies that the Diocese hadn't any particular reason to have withheld those documents as compared to the far larger number that were disclosed early on.

10. What about the Christian Brothers? Did they really deny claims about them just days before the Ryan Report issued its findings, and did they later admit how inadequate and hurtful their responses to complaints had been?
I believe so. This rings a few bells. Still, do you have any reason to believe that a letter from an Irish religious order to the Irish State had anything whatsoever to do with the Vatican? The Ryan Report didn't link the Brothers with Rome...

11. Fair point. It does seem wildly off-topic. What about the claim that Cardinal Desmond Connell, erstwhile Archbishop of Dublin, had gone to the High Court to prevent his successor, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, from releasing documents to the Murphy Commission?
Yeah, he did that in February 2008, believing that these documents were and should remain legally privileged. It was reported at the time that none of his former colleagues in the Hierarchy nor his former aides in Dublin supported this, something that the article omits. It was only a week later that he withdrew the action, apparently following pressure from the Archbishop of Armagh, Primate of All Ireland, something that the article also fails to mention. In any case, though, do you see any reason to assume that Connell -- and Connell alone -- was somehow acting on behalf of the Vatican to subvert the Murphy Commission?

12. It is hard to see why anyone would think that justifies an attack on Rome. What about the claim that John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan lied to the Church's watchdog about abuse in Cloyne?
They certainly did, though how this could ever be construed as justifying an attack on Rome I do not know. Magee and O'Callaghan lied, but they didn't lie to an agency of the State; they lied to one belonging to the Church. Ian Elliott, the Presbyterian head of the Church's child-protection agency was far from happy about this, and indeed, it was in connection with the Elliott Report that Archbishop Leanza, the outgoing Nuncio, in January 2009 had a private meeting with John Magee in which he appears to have 'suggested' that Magee step down; a few days later Magee requested that the Pope appoint an apostolic administrator. Rome did just that, stripping Magee of his authority and ignoring the candidates he'd suggested as suitable to replace him.

13. Is there any basis for his argument? I see the article says that these senior clergy acted as they did as they understood it as being what Rome wanted from them...
Yes, he's referring specifically to Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos who headed the Congregation for the Clergy between 1996 and 2006. His attitude towards priests was deeply clericalist, and in connection with a letter proving Castrillón Hoyos' excessively protective attitude, Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican Press Office publicly criticised him last April, saying that 'This document is proof of the timeliness of the unification of the treatment of cases of the sexual abuse of minors on the part of members of the clergy under the competency of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, to guarantee rigorous and coherent action, as effectively occurred with the documents approved by the Pope in 2001.'

14. Why does McGarry think Castrillón Hoyos influenced high-ranking members of the Irish clergy to obstruct the State?
You mean, leaving aside the fact that he seems to think the examples he cites support his case, when in fact they're wholly irrelevant to it? He has two reasons, the first of which is the January 1997 letter to the Irish bishops and the second of which is something Castrillón Hoyos is alleged to have said to the bishops when they visited Rome two years later.

15. Tell me about the 1997 letter. That was from the Nuncio of the day, passing on the thoughts of the Congregation for Clergy on the Irish bishops' 1996 Framework Document for dealing with child abuse allegations. Is it true that the Congregation for Clergy dismissed it as 'merely a study document'?
'Dismissed' is a bit strong, but Castrillón Hoyos certainly seems to have understood it that way, largely because it was sent to him, not by the Bishops' Conference, but by an Advisory Committee for that Conference, and was prefaced by a statement that the document was far from being the last word on the subject. I'd like to see that covering letter, but as it stands I think it's understandable that he thought this was a study document, even if the Irish bishops didn't think of it as one.

16. Presumably the Irish bishops, on seeing this response, felt obliged to point out that it had been an official document, not a study document?
Er... no. They basically just ignored it and went ahead with their own agreed policy anyway. Well, in practice Magee didn't, but as far as we know the others did.

17. Okay. You've already talked about what the letter said about the need to follow canon law meticulously, of course. Isn't Castrillón Hoyos the same guy who at Rosses Point in 1998 told the Irish bishops that they should never in any way put an obstacle in the path of civil justice?
That's him. And I'd say that failure to report crimes would constitute just that. You'll note that the article leaves that out, inconvenient as it is to its thesis. In my job, that's called 'cherry-picking the evidence'.

18. Well, what about this mysterious Vatican official who seemingly told the Irish bishops in 1999 that they were 'bishops first, not policemen' when it came to reporting clerical child sex abuse -- who's he?
McGarry doesn't say, for some reason, which may well be that it could be libellous, but it seems to have been Castrillón Hoyos again. Seemingly, on an Irish television documentary called Unspeakable Crimes, shown on 17 January 2011, it was reported that when Irish bishops visited Rome in 1999, a meeting ended in uproar with Castrillon Hoyos telling the bishops that they were called to be 'fathers to your priests, not policemen'.

19. That seems to be slightly different from the quote in the article, but anyway, did the bishops do what he said?
No. I've told you -- they basically ignored the Congregation for Clergy and did their own thing. I don't think they had a good relationship with Castrillón Hoyos. McGarry himself has reported that the previous year Archbishop Connell had resorted to banging his fist with fury on the table in an attempt to get Castrillón Hoyos to understand. Whether or not that's true -- and it does rather undermine the thesis that Connell's legal attempt to obstruct Martin was due to his following Castrillón Hoyos' line --  it's clear that the bishops implemented their own guidelines irrespective of what Castrillón Hoyos thought.

Well, except Magee, who seems to have been a law unto himself anyway.

20. Right, so the article goes on to talk about the 2001 decision to have abuse cases dealt with by Rome. What's that about?
Well, it became very clear through the 1990s that the various dioceses around the world had been mishandling child abuse allegations, and that the Congregation for Clergy, under Castrillón Hoyos, hadn't been helping the situation. As such, on 30 April 2001 John Paul II issued a document called Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela which meant that henceforth all child sexual abuse cases were to go through the then Cardinal Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Part I, article 4 of Sacramentorum Sanctitatis Tutela said:

'§ 1.Reservation to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is also extended to a delict against the sixth commandment of the Decalogue committed by a cleric with a minor below the age of eighteen years.
§ 2. One who has perpetrated the delict mentioned in § 1 is to be punished according to the gravity of the offense, not excluding dismissal or deposition.

Note that this document specifically extended the CDF's authority. The CDF had hitherto had only ever dealt with such issues insofar as they were sometimes connected with an abuse of the sacrament of Confession, and in practice it received very few complaints.

21. But Patsy McGarry said this new policy didn't change much in reality?
Yeah, I don't know why he says that. Having received hardly any cases in previous years, the CDF received something like 3,000 cases between 2001 and 2010, most of these from America and detailing offences stretching back to fifty years earlier. I think they get about 250 cases a year now. Monsignor Dolan, the Chancellor of the Dublin Archdiocese, told the Murphy Commission that it had sent nineteen cases to the CDF since 2001.

22. Only nineteen?
Yes, because the policy had to be somewhat modified as Rome wasn't capable of dealing with the avalanche of American complaints in 2003 and 2004. Cases that had already been dealt with before 2001, for instance, weren't revisited by the CDF. In terms of contemporary complaints, however, it has remained the case that all complaints which even reached the threshold of plausibility are to be passed on to Rome so that the CDF could decide whether they'd be best dealt with locally or centrally. And, of course, matters were clarified further by Rome last year, another detail the article neglects to mention.

23. So why does the article say that 'The Cloyne report continues: "The position now, he [Msgr Dolan] said, is that all cases brought to the attention of the archdiocese before April 2001 and which were outside prescription . . . were not going to be dealt with by the CDF. It was up to the bishop to apply disciplinary measures to the management of those priests." In effect, the Irish bishops were back where they were before 2001.'?
I don't know, but it's not true. And for what it's worth, the passage he quotes from section 4:29 of the Murphy Report, and is not in the Cloyne Report at all. That's just sloppiness.

24. McGarry says that Rome didn't grant the Irish bishops permission to make binding either the 1996 Framework Document or the 2005 document Our Children, Our Church, in stark contrast to the approval it gave to the American bishops in 2002 and 2006. Is this true, and if so, why was this?
It is true, and I don't know why. The Murphy Report speculates that the unanimous support of the Irish bishops for the Irish guidelines may have militated against Rome granting them a canonically binding status, but I really don't know. Maybe the American guidelines integrated better into canon law. I don't know.

None of this, however, would have barred any Irish bishop from applying said guidelines within his own diocese. As the Ferns Report recognises, bishops are not delegates of the national bishops' conferences or of the Pope, such that all local decisions rest with them and they are not bound by advice they receive.

25. So when McGarry says that Rome tied the hands of those bishops who wanted to address the abuse issue, this isn't true either?
Exactly. It couldn't have been true. And indeed, we know this, because it seems that almost all Irish bishops ignored the Congregation for Clergy's reservations about the 1996 Framework Document and applied their own policies anyway.

26. What about the letters that were sent to Rome and the last Nuncio that didn't get a response? Did that really happen?
Yes, it did. I think that was extraordinarily bad manners. I really do think an official apology is -- or was -- in order on that.

27. Did it make a difference?
Given that Rome didn't have access to any information on these matters that the Diocese didn't already have, no, it didn't matter in the least. It was rude, that's all.

28. Yes, but what about the fact that the current -- and outgoing -- Nuncio seems to have basically told John Magee to jump from his position rather than be pushed? Surely he wouldn't have done that without access to secret information...
If you'd like to believe that, I have a book about Templars you might want to borrow. The Murphy Report doesn't suggest even for a moment that Leanza had access to any hidden information, and recognises that the Church handed over everything, including all its privileged communications. It's pretty clear that Leanza's prompting of Magee was based on the Elliott Report, which you can read in the Murphy Report.

29. Don't you get tired of correcting these misconceptions?
You have no idea. But as long as our 'newspaper of record' keeps publishing such claptrap, it falls to the rest of us to point out where it's wrong. Child abuse is a horrendous thing that has blighted my country for too long, but political posturing and media misrepresentations aren't part of the solution. It was bad enough when people focused on the Irish Church as a haven of paedophiles while ignoring the far higher number of Irish paedophiles who weren't clergy, such that for every victim of clerical abuse there were fifty-nine victims of non-clerical abuse. But now we're not even looking within, and are trying to point outside ourselves as though the problem is with people far far away. If we want to fix this problem we need to find the real culprits, and if we want to find them, the whole country needs to start looking in the mirror.

30. Do you not think people might accuse you of splitting hairs?
Being Jesuitical, you mean? They might. Others get accused of this. I don't think that anybody hurling those kind of accusations, though, can possibly have immersed themselves in the four Irish state reports and the SAVI study as I have, as well as reading American research and trying to get a serious handle on how the Vatican really works. Too often it's like being in a bizarre University tutorial where you're the only person who's read any of the original sources, but where everybody else has a passionate view on the stuff they've never read. Still, if people shout at you for being honest and informed, that's the way it goes. We have a duty towards the Truth, after all.

Dredd: Once Bitten, Twice Hopeful...

I don't know how many of you remember 1995's Sylvester Stallone take on perhaps the most famous character in modern British comics? Judge Dredd, in most people's memories, was an absolute disaster: the plot was a overloaded hodge-podge of stories, the comic relief was risible -- and not in a good way, the film lacked any of the depth and satirical wit of the strip, and it got the hero fundamentally wrong. And yet, oddly enough, it was still better than Batman Forever, which the critics of that year somehow neglected to pan, leading to them being surprised when the absurdity that was Batman and Robin came along.

I am the Luuuuuuhhhhh!!!!!

Truth be told, the 1995 Dredd wasn't all bad. Diane Lane was very watchable, and even at his hammiest Max von Sydow brightened the screen, and in terms of design I really liked it: Mega-City 1 looked good, and both Mean Machine and the misplaced Hammerstein were spot-on, and things like the bikes and the prison ship were great. But then there were the judge's uniforms.

I've seen a hell of a lot of people sneering online at them, dismissing them as leotards with gleaming pads, and drawing special attention to Stallone's mighty codpiece, but the thing is, stuff that can look great in comics just looks implausible on the screen. Why do you think the cinematic versions of the Batman and the X-Men shun spandex for body armour and leather? That's why, at least in terms of design, I'm looking forward to next year's sally at Mega-City One's finest, with Karl Urban in the title role.

Until this week we'd not had much to go on in terms of what the new judge's uniform would look like -- a distant blurry shot of a judge on a none-too-promising bike, a very murky headshot of Dredd, and the above picture of the film's eponymous hero pointing his Lawgiver at -- well, who knows?

But then, this week, Empire featured a host of shots from the film and some enterprising soul decided to scan them and post them online for the whole world to see. They're encouraging, I think. For starters, we can see that Urban's Dredd isn't a pumped up ogre. This is as it should be. I'll always remember David Bishop explaining to an aspiring artist at the UK Comic Art Convention back in the day that Dredd isn't meant to be a musclebound giant -- he's more of a lean, mean, fighting machine. And indeed, early Ezquerra and Bolland drawings of Dredd were anything but overmuscled, while such artists as Mike McMahon and Brendan McCarthy did wonderfully skinny Dredds.

Perhaps more encouraging still is the fact that the uniform's been changed to look more practical, more gritty. The shoulder, elbow, and knee pads, which have grown to proportions as impractical as they are impressive in the comics, have been reduced to a far more plausible size, not unlike those from the strip's earliest days. The tight leather-esque suits have been ditched too, in favour of something that looks like a natural development from modern riot gear. It looks genuinely futuristic, but rooted in the present; it suggests a future with a past.

The one concern, I feel, lies with the helmet. I've already seen people grumbling, saying that it looks silly, as though it's too big for the judges' heads. I don't blame them, really, but I think they should hold their fire. The simple fact of the matter is that the judges' helmets are very difficult to get right. For all that some people didn't like the helmet Stallone wore -- though they liked things less when he removed it -- it represented a decent stab at handling some serious design problems with the helmet of the comics. 

There are at least two big problems with Dredd's helmet, as we see it in 2000AD. 

In the first place, it only looks good if we presume Dredd's head -- and indeed the judges' heads in general -- is very small. And I mean very small. Even the most realistic takes on Dredd's helmet presuppose that he has an astonishingly tiny head. Dredd wasn't the only character so afflicted in 2000AD. After all, one look at Torquemada's helmet in 'Nemesis the Warlock' should have got you wondering what kind of abnormal had a head that could fit into that thing. For all that Bryan Talbot is a comic genius, I never really bought his Torquemada, because he was clearly a normal man wearing an impossible hat; Kev O'Neill, on the other hand, just drew freaks, and so could get away with it. 

Linked with this is the whole issue of the back of the helmet; if the helmet protects the nape of the neck adequately,  it bars the wearer from looking up or from shooting when lying down, such that the only helmets that could really be plausible in this respect are ones that are flared out at the back.

Those are simple issues of ergonomics, but I think there's another issue too, and that's vision. Dredd's helmet is almost always drawn such that he must be squinting at the world through a narrow slit; certainly, he'd have had no peripheral vision, and you'd rather think that's something he'd want. Stallone's helmet didn't skimp in that respect, ensuring the visor was very wide, and effectively removing the nose-guard. 

Having loved comics and gotten my school magazine banned through my strips when a schoolboy, I used to go to comics conventions back in my late teens, speaking to artists and editors in the hope of getting advice and maybe -- eventually -- becoming a comics artist myself. I got encouragement, too, especially from Bryan Talbot and Steve Pugh, with both of them saying I'd definitely make it if I just practised more -- and my finals soon put paid to that, with life taking a different course soon afterwards. Looking through my portfolio, Steve Pugh was very impressed by my take on Dredd, commending my design work on the helmet in particular. I think it was obvious that I'd spent a lot of time trying to resolve the issues of vision and mobility.

As it happens, I think the vision issue's not a big deal; we can just assume there's kind of an lcd display running across the inside of the helmet, effectively giving the judges a far greater field of view that the visor itself would allow. But that still leaves the fact that the helmet needs to fit on the head, needs to allow the head to move, and needs some padding inside it to cushion any impacts.

Unless you've lots of hair for padding anyway. In which case you'll probably ditch the helmet.

All round, I think the new uniform looks great. I just hope the script, directing, and acting are as good -- and given that Alex Garland penned 28 Days Later, there must, at least, be some slight grounds for hope.

Eolaí and his Painting Tour: Week Four

While I've been busy trying to do my work and make sense of the fallout from the Cloyne Report -- and if you want to read that, scroll down to Tuesday's post and to a few before that -- the Brother's been continuing his epic artistic cycle around Ireland.

We left him, last Thursday, painting in Clonakilty, before going to stay with some lovely people who refuelled him with spicy food and tea in a specially-bought big blue mug. More painting the next day, and then some sightseeing in the afternoon, visiting Drombeg Stone Circle, Glandore, Union Hall, and Castletownsend. The hospitality continued with tea being -- as the wonderful mother of a wonderful ex of mine said when I first set foot in her house -- on tap, and then he was away leaving behind him a lovely painting of Red Strand.

Having stayed on Friday with the same old friend he's stayed with on Wednesday, he set off again on Saturday, battling cramp as he cycled through west Cork, backtracking a few miles to South Ring to paint some more, listening to the curlews, and the terms, and the tide, putting on an extra T-shirt against the cold, and muttering in exasperation as boats he was painting would sail out of sight. In a heroic bit of stereotyping, a lady he'd never met before came out of her house, approached him, and bestowed upon him a mug of tea and a big plate of sandwiches and cakes. With two paintings nearly complete, and an hour and a half behind schedule, he saddled the bike and faced north then west again, heading off back through Clonakilty and onwards through the hills to Skibbereen. Settling in there was a near run thing, as his bike took a puncture, his phone got sickly, and a B&B that had promised him a room turned him away on arrival, saying they'd given it to someone else. Still, a wonderful hostel stepped into the breach, giving him for the price of a dorm bed a family room where he could paint in privacy into the night.

Sunday then saw him painting in the tranquility of Skibbereen, and then refuelling with tea and some much needed food before heading north towards Bantry, tired though he still was from the punishing effect of the back roads of rural Ireland. Monday began with him eating his breakfast with mixed feelings, noting that every time he finishes a rasher himself, he misses his dog. Even with another night's rest, he set off that day at far from peak condition, his calf still hurting from the cramp that'd first struck him on Friday, and his knees still far from happy with the punishment they were getting, ploughing his lonely and determined way past sights both bleak and beautiful.

Still, tired and sore though he was, he found time to admire gorgeous views whilst drinking tea and made it to Glengarriff, aching and exhausted from spending the day marvelling in pain at the beauty all around him. The view out his window was great, and perhaps nicer still in the morning.

I was reassured to see him tweeting again on Tuesday, as in the dead of night he'd tweeted a deperate cry that his tablet had died, rendering him computerless, but following a friend's advice and trying the hard reset had been all he'd needed to do to resuscitate the beast. He said his goodbyes to Glengarriff, where the local Gaelic club had obviously won something recently, and headed north, to torture his knees further by climbing through the mountains to Kenmare. Off he went, then, to great encouragement and with someone else having attempted a rendering of him with the air of, as someone said, 'the conquering barbarian about him'. Somehow his knees did the job and got him through Caha Pass, over the mountains, and out of Cork into Kerry, his ninth county, in one piece, consumed though he was with a bottomless craving for tea as he arrived in Kenmare and settled down in the street to paint.

More painting in Kenmare was on Wednesday's agenda, as he supped his tea and wondered how the weather would turn out. It was -- technically -- dry, but it was dark and cool and hinting at rain. Taking his paints to the street again, he settled down outside the aptly named Cupán Tae where €2.50 got him three pots of tea, and he'd no shortage of people to talk to. Onward and upward then on a few mouthfuls of brown bread to Moll's Gap, and down along a bumpy twisty road, thankfully free of coaches, through Muckross to Killarney itself, pushing just a few miles further to a little cottage and hot teapot, wrapped in cosy anticipation. During the night he fell asleep at the table last night, and waking shivering and with tingling feet, he took some more tea, making everything seem better, and then went to bed.

As for today? Well, last I looked he'd been watching a match, and muttering darkly about how frustrating it can be when you're chasing the sunset while painting a field of hay, only for the farmer to come along and start baling it. Now if only you could make the sun stand still...

As I keep saying, you can and should follow him on his blog and especially on Twitter, where his hashtag's #paintingtour. And again, as I've also said before, if you think there's a chance he might be passing within twenty miles or so of where you live and you have a bed to offer and fancy a painting, you should let him know. Just send him a message. It's not called social networking for nothing...

Stewart Lee, or When Comedy's Medium is its Message

I've been a fan of Stewart Lee's for a long time, ever since one of my closest friends introduced me to Pea Green Boat, that hilariously and horrifyingly mesmering blurring of the boundaries between comedy and nightmare. I haven't liked every thing I've seen or heard Lee do -- one routine in particular left me very uncomfortable, though I could see why he did it -- but on balance I find him the most relentlessly intelligent comedian I've ever experienced. And I say that having been to see him twice, and with five DVDs, two CDs, and a book of his work sitting on my shelves. I loved his latest TV series, which I think was even better than the previous one, and was fascinated to watch routines mutate from a full version in one live show into a much shorter version in another live show, into a briefer and highly modified version when performed in Ireland, and then be released, tuned to perfection, on television.

One of the most impressive things about his work is how he draws attention to the craft of comedy -- indeed, he does so to such a degree that a lot of his work is comedy about comedy, what I might, if I were feeling pretentious, call 'metacomedy'. But I'm not, so I won't.

It was odd to see him in the news in recent weeks, with a line from one of his shows being put -- wholly devoid of context -- to an obviously embarrassed Michael McIntyre. Of course, as every good Evangelical will tell you, a text without a context becomes a pretext for a proof text, and it's utterly meaningless to rip one phrase out of a whole show, especially a show as tightly-written as Lee's tend to be. I was glad to see his response, forwarded to me by a friend a few days back. As one would expect, it's a scornful dismantling of the British media and its tendency to conjure up stories from little more than whimsy and bile.

Lee's fascination with the craft of comedy is at the heart of his superb 2010 book, How I Escaped My Certain Fate: The Life and Deaths of a Stand-Up Comedian, and it leads him to see others through the prism of the performance of comedy. For instance, starting on page 156 of the book, he says...

'I suspect, reluctantly, that the actual business of being a priest isn't that different in some ways to the business of being a comedian. My wife took me to her church in Gloucester. I always listen to the way the sermons are pitched with interest. It was a mixed audience -- old Irish fellers, lots of displaced Filipinos, Poles, general Catholic diaspora, many without English as a first language. Tough crowd. And the Father's out of the pulpit, down in the aisle, shouting, jumping around, working the room. The priest that did our marriage course in Stoke Newington faced a similar problem of playing to an incredibly varied demographic. His approach was to speak softly and calmly about some incident or personal story that seemed a million miles away from religion, then, having drawn the punters in, to clobber them with a theological right hook. Most priests are rubbish performers, though, and one wonders how an organisation as wealthy as the Catholic Church, for example, can't spare some money to school the poor sods in a few basics of stagecraft. That said, the good ones are an inspiration, and let's not forget a lot of them are turning over a new twenty minutes each week, which makes even the stalwarts of the Comedy Store's Cutting Edge Team look lazy.'

It's a book I really can't recommend enough, not least because its structure and mannerisms are impressively akin to his shows. We know that the 'Stewart Lee' of the performances is to some extent a construct, a distilled version of aspects of Lee's own character, but what of the 'Stewart Lee' who introduces and comments on the scripts of the three shows discussed in the book. We see the irony and the mechanisms, the repeated jokes and the call-backs that are at the heart of his work. How much of this are we meant to take seriously?

But then, I like the idea of a book about comedy being itself -- in effect -- a comedic performance, especially given that Lee's comedically dissecting his own comedic dissections of comedy and other comedians. It's probably not surprising that I'd like this, given my love for comics about comics, or of Vermeer's painting about painting. I like it when media discuss themselves; it just shows what they can do. I like it when the medium and the message admit that they're one and the same.

Lee's not for everyone by any means, but his latest TV series was a perfect example of comedy can be about comedy, and how it's perfectly possible to be extremely funny and deadly serious at the same time. I'll look forward to getting the DVD before the year is out.

How Many Questions on the Cloyne Report?

42, if you're interested. It struck me that it mightn't be a bad idea to pull together in a straightforward questions-and-answers format most of my thoughts on the Cloyne Report and how people are reacting to it. It might be useful.

1. What's going on? Why has the Papal Nuncio to Ireland been recalled to the Vatican?

Nobody really knows. Certainly, experienced Vatican observers haven't been quick to say when such a thing last happened. Some think it's a diplomatic snub to Ireland for the Taoiseach having basically defamed the Pope and the Vatican in his speech last week, but most reckon it's simply so that he can consult in person with those in Rome who'll have the job of responding formally to the Cloyne Report and the various claims made by the Taoiseach and other members of the Government. The Government doesn't think that the response of the Pope's spokesman, Father Federico Lombardi, constitutes an official response, and has refused to engage with it, other than, in the case of the Minister for Justice, to dismiss it as 'disingenuous'.

2. What exactly is the Cloyne Report, and why is it causing such a storm?

It's a report into an investigation by Judge Yvonne Murphy and others into how, between 1996 and 2009, the diocese of Cloyne, in County Cork, dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse and expressions of concern about clergy; these allegations dated right back to the 1930s, though the decade to which most complaints related was the 1960s, and roughly two-thirds of the allegations, as far as we can say, were in connection with people who had at the time been young children. The Report found that neither the then bishop of the diocese, John Magee, who was stripped of his authority by Rome in March 2009, nor his vicar general, Denis O'Callaghan, had ever made any attempt to follow the Irish Church's own guidelines for dealing with allegations of child abuse.

3. Why did they do this?

In the case of John Magee it's difficult to tell; the Report makes clear, however, that Denis O'Callaghan was deeply opposed to the Church dealing with allegations of abuse in a rules-based way, strongly believing that a more pastoral approach would always be better. The Report holds that those who were opposed to following the guidelines felt entitled to do so because the Vatican had issues with the guidelines.

4. Why did the Vatican have issues with the guidelines?

In 1996 the Irish bishops -- including Magee -- drew up a set of guidelines for dealing with allegations of child abuse. They sent these guidelines to Rome in the hope of getting official approval for them. In 1997, the Vatican's Congregation for Clergy replied, saying that the guidelines were problematic: they had potential to clash with canon law, such that there was a concern that abusive priests found guilty through procedures conducted under the guidelines could successfully appeal to Rome on procedural grounds, and it had unspecified concerns about mandatory reporting. The Congregation did, however, insist that canon law should be meticulously followed in dealing with these matters.

5. Canon law? What does that have to do with anything?

Canon law is really just the name we give to the Church's own internal rulebook. The Church, existing throughout the world, needs a universal set of rules than can apply as effectively in Cuba and China as in Ireland and the Philippines. These rules need to take account of the fact that while freedom of religion is accepted in countries like the United States and Germany, it is seriously curtailed in countries like Saudi Arabia and North Korea. Back when the Murphy Report on the Dublin Archdiocese was issued in 2009, there was a lot of talk about canon law, but what the Murphy Report made clear was that canon law was never the problem in Dublin. The problem was that canon law wasn't applied.

6. So the problem in Cloyne is that the guidelines weren't followed, but that canon law was?

No, canon law wasn't followed either. Denis O'Callaghan didn't believe that abuse was best dealt with through a rules-based approach. He thought a pastoral approach was the way forward. John Magee didn't seem to care either way.

7. How exactly did Cloyne deal with allegations?

It's hard to summarise, save that the best word to describe O'Callaghan's methods is 'unsystematic'. Removal of accused priests from ministry -- recognised as the most important thing the Church can do when it receives allegations -- seems to have been normal, but the Diocese' monitoring of accused priests wasn't up to much, and in a lot of cases it failed to pass on allegations to the Gardaí in a timely manner, if at all. Interestingly, the Report notes that Magee seems never to have indulged in the notorious practice known in the American public school system as 'passing the trash'. Of all the priests about whom allegations were received or concerns raised, only two are in ministry in the diocese now.

8. How many allegations did the diocese receive?

The Report deals with allegations against nineteen priests, including John Magee himself --

9. John Magee? There were allegations against the Bishop?

Yes. Well, sort of. There was a troubling incident or series of incidents, but it seems that the matter in question, while inappropriate and unwise, couldn't possibly be deemed child sexual abuse. It's difficult to see what the Diocese' response to an allegation of something that certainly wasn't child sexual abuse is doing in a report on how the Diocese dealt with allegations of child sexual abuse, but there you have it. The Report's not perfect.

10. Right, so it deals with allegations against eighteen priests. That's a lot, isn't it?

It is, though it depends on what you mean by a lot. The Devil's in the details, and when thinking of these eighteen priests, it's worth keeping mind that the Report notes that 430 priests were incardinated in the Diocese between 1932, the year in which the oldest priest covered in the Report had been ordained, and 2010, and that there has been only one case in Cloyne where a court decreed a priest guilty of any sort of sexual abuse. I think even one is one too many, really.

• Two of the cases deal not with allegations but mere expressions of concern, one about an isolated episode seventeen years earlier. 
• At least three allegations were against priests who had died before any accusations were received, so they weren't given any opportunity of defending themselves -- indeed, a fourth such case is almost certainly related to a long-dead priest, the identity of whom remains unknown even now -- and three complaints were about priests who died soon after allegations were received. 
• In four cases, the Director of Public Prosecutions decided against pressing charges, and although charges were brought in a fifth case, no criminal prosecution took place. 
• The Director of Public Prosecutions repeatedly decided against pressing charges against yet another priest, identified in the Report as 'Father Ronat' and in the Elliott Report as 'Father B'; however he has since been tried and acquitted.
• In only one case has a priest of Cloyne diocese been convicted of any crime related to abuse: this priest, the Report's 'Father Caden', pleaded guilty to gross indecency and received an eighteen-month suspended sentence.

11. So you're saying that only one of these priests was guilty of child abuse?
No, I'm certainly not saying that. Other than the case of Father Caden, for example, it seems that two other priests admitted abuse of minors. One accused priest, who died in 2002, some years after the Diocese had heard of his misconduct in the 1960s, had admitted his behaviour to his superiors, but neither they nor the Gardaí had made any effort to have him face justice. Another priest, after admitting that he'd had a relationship with a sixteen-year-old girl -- which she denied -- then fled the diocese, eloping with a married woman. More broadly, lots of these allegations have a ring of truth about them -- although at least one looks almost certainly false -- but it's fiendishly difficult to prove anything in child abuse cases, especially ones relating to events that took place decades earlier, and at least in Irish civil law we hold to the principle that one is innocent until proven guilty.

12. Were any children harmed because of the Diocese' unwillingness to follow the bishops' guidelines?
Apparently not. Certainly, the Report never makes such a claim -- although the Church's own investigation into Cloyne, included as an appendix to the main report, had concluded that Magee and O'Callaghan's actions were such that children had been placed at risk of harm.

13. Did Magee and O'Callaghan break the law in this respect?
Again, apparently not. The Report details how in January 2009 a member of the public made a complaint to the Gardaí that Magee had endangered children by withholding information from the Gardaí, but the DPP advised that no criminal offences had been disclosed, noting that the reckless endangerment of children only became an offence in Irish law in 2006.

14. Did they break any laws at all?
The Report only finds that they scorned the Irish bishops' guidelines. It's apparent from the Report that they also broke the moral law of God and the canon law of the Church, but it is equally apparent that they did not break the civil law of the State. So if -- unlike me -- you're going to take the view that the only law that matters in these affairs is the law of the land, then no. They didn't break any laws.

15. Were things ever handled properly?
Not by Magee and O'Callaghan prior to 2008, but yes. The Report details one instance of a complaint made against a member of a religious order who had been based in Cloyne; this event, complained of in 2002, allegedly took place in 1966. The priest denied the charges against him, and the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to prosecute, citing 'the minor nature of the incident, the delay in reporting same and the lack of corroborative evidence'. The Report found that 'As is often the case with child sexual abuse complaints, where there is a credible complaint and a credible denial, there is, unfortunately, no resolution.'

16. Right, so let’s get back to the Taoiseach’s speech. What was it about?
The speech was in support of a motion that the Dáil 'deplores the Vatican’s intervention which contributed to the undermining of the child protection frameworks and guidelines of the Irish State and the Irish bishops'

17. The Vatican's intervention? Does he mean the 1997 reply to the bishops?
He does. I know, a reply is hardly an intervention, but there you have it. In my experience if you ask somebody for something, you have to be prepared for the possibility that they'll say no.

18. Is there any evidence that the Vatican's 1997 reply undermined the bishops in the implementation of their guidelines?
Not as far as we know. The Cloyne Report claims this several times but never shows it. The fact that Denis O'Callaghan may have felt vindicated by the Congregation for Clergy's refusal to make official the bishops' guidelines doesn't look particularly meaningful in light of how he also wholly ignored the Congregation's insistence that canon law be meticulously followed.

19. The general theme of the Taoiseach's speech seems to have been that everything is Rome's fault. Am I right in thinking that the Taoiseach said that the Cloyne Report exposed an attempt by the Vatican, in the last three years, to frustrate an official Irish inquiry?

Yes, you are.

20. And did it?

No. The Report says very little about the Vatican’s dealings with the Commission. It says that the Commission asked the Papal Nuncio – the Vatican’s representative in Ireland – to supply any documentation the Nunciature held in connection with how the diocese of Cloyne had dealt with abuse allegations received between 1996 and 2009. It says that the Nuncio explained that the Nunciature didn’t hold any documents but that the Diocese held everything and was obliged to comply with the law of the land. And indeed, it says the Diocese did just that. The Report doesn’t criticise the Vatican at all in this respect.

21. So everybody cooperated with the Commission?

Oddly, no. The Office for the Minister for Children claimed privilege over legal advice it had received. The Commission explicitly contrasts the actions of the State in this regard with those of the Church, saying: ‘The Commission notes that, in contrast, the Church authorities provided the Commission with its privileged documents and the Gardaí and the HSE did not claim privilege over any documents.’

22. Did the Taoiseach acknowledge this in his speech?
Kind of. He alluded to 'unseemly bickering' between the Minister for Children and the HSE. He reserved all his serious criticism for Rome.

23. Even though Rome doesn't seem to have had any influence on events in Ireland?
That's putting it mildly. For what it's worth, it seems that the bishops ignored the Congregation for Clergy's reservations about the 1996 guidelines and did their own thing anyway. I'm not saying that that's a bad thing -- in this case -- just that it shows how frail Rome's grip on the Irish Church is.
 
24. Did the Vatican seriously tell the bishops that they weren't to report abuse allegations?
Of course not. The Congregation for Clergy expressed concerns about mandatory reporting in its 1997 reply, but in a November 1998 meeting with the bishops at Rosses Point in Sligo, the then head of the Congregation for Clergy explicitly told the Irish bishops that they 'should not in any way put an obstacle in the legitimate path of civil justice'.

25. Hmmm. Well, anyway, let’s stay with the Taoiseach. Maybe he was speaking of the previous Nuncio’s failure to respond to the Murphy Commission’s request that the Nunciature supply the Commission with any documents it might need that the archdiocese of Dublin would lack, or to confirm that the Nunciature held no such documents?

That is how the Irish Times tried to excuse it in its editorial on the subject, but leaving aside that that happened in February 2007 -- more than four years ago, and thus not within the last three years -- it had already been covered in 2009’s Murphy Report. The Taoiseach can hardly have been referring to that when he said the Cloyne Report had revealed interference for the first time. Indeed, a Government spokesman later clarified the Taoiseach’s statement by saying that he wasn’t talking about anything in particular, but was just generally referring to the cumulative effect of the Vatican’s actions.

26. So the Taoiseach said one thing, when he actually meant something completely different?

Indeed he did. There’s a word for that where I come from.

27. Are you saying the Taoiseach lied to the Dáil?
Hey, you said it. Of course, you'd not be the first person to have said something along those lines in recent weeks.

28. What do you mean by that?
Well, before the Cloyne Report distracted everybody, the Taoiseach and the Government had gotten themselves into a spot of bother. On 8 February this year, during the election campaign, the Taoiseach -- as he is now -- gave a speech in which he pledged to protect and defend the accident and emergency services of Roscommon County Hospital.  The two local Fine Gael TD's, Denis Naughten and Frank Feighan, were re-elected. In the aftermath of the election the Government, acting on the advice of the Health Information and Quality Authority -- which based its advice on conditions in a hospital in Cloyne, ironically enough -- decided to shut Roscommon County Hospital's A&E department.

This led to uproar, predictably, and questions were asked in the Dáil about whether the Taoiseach had misled people on such matters. The Taoiseach dismissed this line of questioning as 'pathetic', and insisted that he was on the record as having stated on numerous radio stations throughout the campaign that he would not be making promises he couldn't keep. Once a recording appeared of him having indeed announced that he would protect Roscommon's A&E facilities, he apologised over any confusion he might have caused by his making two such contradictory statements. The leader of the Opposition accused him of having misled the Dáil and challenged the Taoiseach on this very point, saying:

'It was you who personally promised to tell it straight. It was you who denied to RTÉ and to this house that you made any promise in relation to Roscommon Hospital. And you were caught out. And I find it incredible that that you cannot face up to that here in the house today and put the record straight.'

29. So a politician has lied twice. This looks like common-or-garden political opportunism, then. Has it worked?
I'm afraid so. It seems that misleading the Dáil once gets you into trouble, but doing so again gets you right out of it. A bit like repeatedly rolling doubles in Monopoly, I suppose. The Taoiseach's very popular at the moment. It doesn't hurt that the most eloquent and prominent voices in our national media have had their knives out -- and not always without reason -- for the Church for a long time; they'll forgive their champion a lot. And he has caught a popular mood, such that anyone who actually shows any sign of having read the Report tends to get dismissed out of hand by a horde of people sneering 'Well, you can prove anything with facts, can't you?'

 30. But the Report must say quite a bit about the Vatican, though, surely? I mean, the Taoiseach can hardly have been lying when he said the Report excavated the disfunction, disconnection, elitism, and narcissism that dominate the Vatican... he must have something to go on?

No, the Report says basically nothing about the Vatican, which is hardly surprising, as it wasn’t an investigation into how the Vatican handles things. It does claim, as I’ve said, that a 1997 Vatican response to a 1996 document drawn up by the bishops had the effect of undermining child protection in the Irish Church, but aside from providing no evidence to support this claim, it never says that this was the Vatican's intention.

31. What of the line about the Vatican responding to evidence of betrayal and abuse, not with sympathy, but by parsing and analysing it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer?

The Report says only four of the abuse cases dealt with in the Cloyne Report were ever passed over to Rome, these being the cases of the pseudonymous fathers Ronat, Calder, Drust, and Caden.  It says nothing at all in connection with how the Vatican dealt with three of these cases, as they were only passed to Rome in 2009 and had not been resolved when the Commission began its work. As for the complaint against ‘Father Caden’ by a fellow priest, the Report notes that allegations of this abuse, committed in the early 1980s, were passed to Rome in December 2005, with a decision being made in April 2007. That decision was that Caden should remain barred from exercising any priestly ministry, as indeed he had been since before the Diocese had contacted Rome, and that any breaches of disciplinary measures or repeated abusive behaviour would result in further sanctions. I can’t see how one could construe anything from this about Roman disfunctionality or any of the Taoiseach’s other accusations. 

And for what it’s worth, in my experience canon lawyers don’t have ‘gimlet eyes’.

32. But didn’t the Pope say that the Church shouldn’t be held to the same standards as civil society? The Taoiseach said he did...

No, the Pope didn’t say that, although by quoting a truncated sentence out of context, the Taoiseach certainly gave that impression. In an official 1990 document called Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, the then Cardinal Ratzinger said that the Church is a mystery of communion, in which all of us are called to strive with sincere hearts for a harmonious unity in doctrine, life, and worship, such that: ‘For this reason, standards of conduct, appropriate to civil society or the workings of a democracy, cannot be purely and simply applied to the Church.’ He explained that Christian truth is diachronic, such that the faith of the Church today must remain that of the earliest Christian community, and cannot be altered on the basis of opinion polls or even large numbers of modern theologians: we cannot impose our opinions on the truth.

33. That sounds like a fairly obscure document. How on earth would the Taoiseach know about it? Does he have any friends who are priests? Or any advisers?

Well, it’s funny you should say that. One of the Taoiseach’s closest advisers is Frank Flannery, Fine Gael’s Director of Organisation and Strategy, and both of Frank’s brothers are priests. One of them, Tony, is a founder member and a prominent voice in the new Association of Catholic Priests.

34. The Association of Catholic Priests? What’s that?

Between 1975 and 2007, Ireland’s priests were organised as a sort-of trade union called the National Conference of Priests of Ireland. Highly unwieldy and fairly ineffective, the organisation collapsed after Father John Littleton, its president, retired;  not one of the NCPI’s 6,000 members was willing to go forward to replace him. The Association of Catholic Priests is a sort of successor movement, proposed by Tony Flannery and others last summer and founded last autumn.

35. So all Irish priests are members?

No. Not even close. Maybe one in ten is. The ACP was never intended to incorporate all priests, as its founders believed this would be impossible considering the diversity of opinion in the Irish Church. Openly expressing from the start a ‘strained relationship between priests and their bishops,’ among its initial aims was to look seriously at ‘the ministry, government and sexual teaching of the Church’.  Thus far it hasn't much more than 500 or so members, all from the most liberal end of the Church in Ireland, and with few if any of them among the Church’s younger priests. Before the last fortnight or so it has been vocal mainly in opposition to the universal introduction of a new, more accurate translation of the Mass throughout the English-speaking world.

36. What did the ACP think of the Taoiseach’s speech?

It seems to have thought it was, in the main, great. Tony Flannery wrote an article for the Irish Times saying that he was happy with it, and that all the members of the association who rang him said they were delighted with it. He thought it was good to hear the Taoiseach challenge the Vatican ‘so strongly, so eloquently, and with such dignity’, given how he dislikes the way the Vatican conducts its business. Brendan Hoban, another ACP founder, said that the Taoiseach’s speech was an object lesson in leadership from a man who is proud to identify himself as a faithful, practising Catholic, and that the Taoiseach had effectively articulated how the dominance of Rome is strangling the emergence of a people’s Church in Ireland. The Taoiseach claims to have been astounded by how many letters he’s received from priests, praising him from speaking out as he did, but I rather suspect that most of those letters were from members of the ACP.

37. So you basically think that the Taoiseach, in attacking Rome while defending Ireland’s ‘good priests’, was acting as a mouthpiece for liberal Irish priests.

More or less, yes. I seriously doubt that was his plan -- political opportunism and the need to distract people from the Roscommon debacle aside, I think his main concern was to express a sincere and thoroughly understandable sense of frustration -- but yes.

On the other hand, though, the Government may have gone too far in its rhetoric about the Seal of Confession. Even Tony Flannery, Brendan Hoban, and the ACP spokesman P.J. Madden have spoken out against the Government’s declared determination to render illegal the failure to disclose information acquired even through Confession.

38. Is the Seal of Confession really under threat?

No, almost certainly not; if it is, it has been for some time already. Under existing laws, passed in 1997 and 1998, Irish citizens already have obligations to report certain serious offences where they do not have ‘reasonable excuse’ for not doing so. When shorn of anti-clerical rhetoric, the proposed new law will simply extend the existing principles so that sexual offences against children and vulnerable adults are recognised as among these serious offences. The current legislation does not define what constitutes ‘reasonable excuse’, and there is no plan for the proposed legislation to do so. This shall be a matter for the courts.

39. So the courts could rule that the intrinsic confidentiality of Confession is not such that it would constitute a reasonable excuse for withholding knowledge of, say, terrorist offences or child abuse?

It’s highly unlikely. In the first place, it seems likely that any such attempt to force a priest to disclose anything revealed in Confession would be in breach of the protections of privacy and religious freedom guaranteed explicitly or implicitly both by the Irish Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights. Granted, there are public order exceptions to those rights, but the onus would be on a prosecutor to show that such guarantees did not apply in a particular instance. 

What’s more, the Seal already has a measure of protection in Irish common law. Although the decision made in Cook v Carroll (1945), recognising the privilege of parishioners in communications with their parish priest, was based on part on a part of the Constitution which has since been changed, it retains its status as a binding precedent. In 1999 a non-binding opinion was expressed by Judge Hugh Geoghegan in the High Court to the effect that given the nature of Confession, a priest could probably not be compelled to disclose what had been confessed to him even if a penitent gave him permission to do so.

40. Couldn’t the Government bring in legislation specifically to remove these common law protections?

Perhaps, but given that it doesn’t plan on redefining what constitutes a reasonable excuse, that’s not on the cards. The Seal is safe. The safety of the many thousands of those in whom abuse survivors have confided, is, on the other hand, a different matter. Is ‘my husband told me what happened to him when he was younger, but I didn’t report it as it hurts him too much even to talk about it’ a reasonable excuse? What about ‘my oldest friend told me what happened to her, but I didn’t report what she said because she said she couldn’t face the idea of going through this in court, and besides, she said it was a long time ago, and she hoped the fella who did it had got help, that he’d changed...’? 

41. Are there likely to be many people in such a position?

There are. Child abuse seems to have been endemic in Ireland; just looking at the figures from the 2002 SAVI Study, it seems that 27 per cent of Irish adults in 2001 had been victims of sexual abuse while children or adolescents, with just under 0.5 per cent of Irish adults at that point having been abused by clergy. The study indicated that roughly half of those survivors had told somebody -- usually family or friends -- of having been sexually abused as a child, but had not reported this to the Gardaí. It seems that there must be at least tens of thousands of Irish adults who are currently withholding knowledge of child sexual abuse -- indeed, the number of such adults may well be much higher than that.

42. So, to wrap up, what does the Cloyne Report mainly tell us?
It tells us that although the Irish Church's child-protection procedures are far more stringent than those of the Irish State, which it describes as less precise and harder to follow than those of the Church, being especially weak in the area of monitoring, even the best procedures in the world are worthless if the people who have the job of implementing them aren't willing to do so. It is damning in its criticism of John Magee and Denis O'Callaghan's failures, but it says nothing whatsoever about the wider Church, in Ireland or abroad.

On Norway, and the Sun, and Speaking Too Soon

Charlie Brooker has a fine piece in today's Guardian where he is more scathing than usual about the British media, saying, for instance:

'I went to bed in a terrible world and awoke inside a worse one. At the time of writing, details of the Norwegian atrocity are still emerging, although the identity of the perpetrator has now been confirmed and his motivation seems increasingly clear: a far-right anti-Muslim extremist who despised the ruling party.

Presumably he wanted to make a name for himself, which is why I won't identify him. His name deserves to be forgotten. Discarded. Deleted. Labels like "madman", "monster", or "maniac" won't do, either. There's a perverse glorification in terms like that. If the media's going to call him anything, it should call him pathetic; a nothing.

On Friday night's news, they were calling him something else. He was a suspected terror cell with probable links to al-Qaida. Countless security experts queued up to tell me so. This has all the hallmarks of an al-Qaida attack, they said. Watching at home, my gut feeling was that that didn't add up. Why Norway? And why was it aimed so specifically at one political party? But hey, they're the experts. They're sitting there behind a caption with the word "EXPERT" on it. Every few minutes the anchor would ask, "What kind of picture is emerging?" or "What sense are you getting of who might be responsible?" and every few minutes they explained this was "almost certainly" the work of a highly-organised Islamist cell.

[...]

Soon, the front page of Saturday's Sun was rolling off the presses. "Al-Qaeda" Massacre: NORWAY'S 9/11 – the weasel quotes around the phrase "Al Qaeda" deemed sufficient to protect the paper from charges of jumping to conclusions.'

Even as the front page of the Sun was previewed online, friends of mine were sceptical. The quotation marks were the big clue, and the standard quip was that, now barred from hacking phones and bribing police, the Sun had just taken to making stuff up. No other paper, it's worth noting, ran a frontpage headline even tentatively ascribing blame. It's worth taking a look at that front page.

Fantastic, isn't it? And that's nothing compared to what was inside. I don't mean what they left on the website after they corrected it once it became obvious how wrong they were. I mean what they printed, and published, and what several million people will have read on Saturday morning.

The current line is increasingly that Anders Behring Breivik is a fundamentalist Christian. This is obviously wrong too. He may call himself a 'Christian' on his Facebook page, but page 1307 of his online manifesto reveals a rather idiosyncratic understanding of what it is to be a Christian:

'If you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God then you are a religious Christian. Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.'

So while I'd certainly say that as someone who's been baptised he is -- ontologically speaking -- a Christian in the strictest and original sense, it's pretty clear that he's not a Christian in the more mundane sense of what he believes. Certainly, it's clear than nobody who thinks of Christianity as a mere matter of belief could ever say that he's a Christian in any sense. Christians often say that Christianity isn't a religion so much as a relationship, and although this is a cliché, it's only one because it's true. Christianity can be 'a cultural, social, identity, and moral platform' but it can only be that if it is first a living relationship with Christ.

I'm not using a 'no true Scotsman' argument here. This is an empirical thing, insofar as we can judge based on what this Eurabia-obsessed nut has written and said. After all, as Lewis said in Mere Christianity:

'It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.

It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian in this refined sense. And obviously a word which we can never apply is not going to be a very useful word. As for the unbelievers, they will no doubt cheerfully use the word in the refined sense. It will become in their mouths simply a term of praise. In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man. But that way of using the word will be no enrichment of the language, for we already have the word good. Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.

We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts 11:26) to "the disciples," to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles. There is no question of its being restricted to those who profited by that teaching as much as they should have. There is no question of its being extended to those who in some refined, spiritual, inward fashion were "far closer to the spirit of Christ" than the less satisfactory of the disciples. The point is not a theological, or moral one. It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.'

Breivik clearly distinguishes between 'religious' Christians and  those for whom 'Christian' is a synonym for someone with a certain understanding of the West, that being a reconstructed fantasy Christendom, starkly opposed to the Marxist-Islamist 'Eurabia' of so many right-wing nightmares. In truth, though, I don't think anybody should be trying to pigeonhole him among their enemies. He's a nut, that's all, one who's consumed by a violent hatred of Islam. More than that, I really don't think we can say.