Time To Look Within

I've met Christine Buckley many times, and though this probably won't endear me to quite a few of my fellow Catholics, I've always got on well with her. And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure she likes me too.

That said, I think her letter to today's Irish Times is completely off-kilter, and not just because she seems to think that money sent to Rome as part of the annual 'Peter's Pence' collection is morally and justifiably our money, rather than money which we gave away of our own choice to support an organization with an annual operating budget not much more than half that of UCD's.

At the core of her letter is this passage:

'Now the Vatican is not interested in our economic meltdown. Indeed it probably expects us to contribute substantially in terms of security and other supports for the Eucharistic Congress in 2012. So here is the deal: we’ll say yes to the embassy and the Congress – provided that the Vatican pays its share towards all the costs that Irish taxpayers have incurred in order to find out the truth about abuse. The Ryan report cost €126 million, The Redress Board to date €1.3 billion, The Ferns report €2.3 million, the Murphy report €3.6 million to date and the Cloyne report €1.9 million.'

The Vatican is most definitely interested in our economic meltdown. Indeed, given that the meltdown was caused by rampant greed and ridiculous exercises in financial plate-spinning, this shouldn't surprise us. We need but think of the Pope's criticism of unbridled capitalism in his third Papal encyclical, 2009's Caritas in Veritate, of how he touched on similar themes in this year's second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth, and of how the Vatican's Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace recently issued a huge document criticising neo-liberal economics and proposing measures to help act against future financial crises.

The Vatican hasn't complained about the Irish decision to shut the embassy to the Holy See. Indeed, I don't think anybody's complained about that other than people who realise that it's against Ireland's national interests for us to have done so. It doesn't affect the Vatican one bit. Gilmore's decision to close our embassy to the Holy See is something that's a loss to us, not to Rome.

As for the issue of costs incurred by Irish taxpayers in finding out the truth about abuse? Well, Christine says that the State has spent something of the order of €134 million on enquiries, as well as €1.3 billion on the Redress Board. So it has, but the question, surely, is what does any of this have to do with the Vatican.

As I explained back in July, almost all the money the State has spent in these matters has related to abuse that took place in Ireland's industrial schools, all of which -- though run by religious orders -- were supervised by the Irish State and not by the Vatican in any sense. The Ryan Report is absolutely damning about the State's failure to monitor these schools which it had set up and funded, and for which it was responsible. It never raises the slightest suggestion that the Vatican was in any way responsible for what happens, and doesn't even allow for the possibility that it might have been worth asking the Vatican for information; it was clearly obvious to the Ryan Commission that the Vatican was wholly unaware of what was going on.

It is true that just under €8 million was spent by the State on the Ferns, Dublin, and Cloyne Reports, none of which investigated abuse, instead investigating how allegations of abuse and expressions of concern were handled, but again the question is whether Rome knew what was going on.

Contrary to what people tend to think, the Church isn't an institution; rather, it's a loose network made up of thousands of institutions, many of which are almost wholly autonomous. The Irish Church alone has more than 180 separate bodies, and Rome -- as a rule -- only knows what's going on based on what it's told by the various institutions that make up the Irish Church.

If you look at the Dublin Report, for instance, you'll see that of the 46 sample cases of alleged abuse reported between 1975 and 2004 that the Murphy Commission considered, only four cases were ever reported to Rome. Likewise, looking at the eighteen priests about whom complaints were made or concerns were expressed in Cloyne between 1996 and 2009, again only four cases were passed on to Rome, three of these not being passed on until 2009. In short, it seems that Irish dioceses habitually tried to deal with things 'in house', and made a point of keeping Rome out of the loop.

This is a major part of the problem caused by Enda's speech in the summer, and how it's been defended by the likes of Patsy McGarry: it presented falsehood as truth, and helped to create and drive the false impression that the problem in the Irish Church lay far away in Rome rather than being right here, among the Irish people.