with Stephen Meyler

#Catholic Church

#TheAngelus

#Salisbury

ABUSIVE LANGUAGE

Another month, another clerical abuse scandal. Germany, Australia, Chile, the US (where nine states are now investigating historical abuse), and of course Ireland’s ongoing abuse scandals: as the list grows, isn’t it diffi cult to be outraged any more? The association between the Catholic Church and horrible crimes against children is automatic now, too obvious to be worth a comedy gag: the David McSavage child-snatching priest of a few years back isn’t all that satirical anymore.

Nonetheless, no matter how jaded we are by clerical abuse, how ‘normalised’ it has become, it continues to poison what is left of the Catholic Church.

The scale of the crimes makes it seems like there can’t be a single Catholic diocese on the planet where there haven’t been clergy who have abused. As we saw from the many empty corrals at the recent papal event in the Phoenix Park, many of the supposed majority of Catholics in Ireland are now of the christenings, marriages and funerals only variety. They want the church and its priests for the decorative or comforting rituals to mark big life events. They don’t want them, by and large, to be involved in running or owning schools and hospitals. The pope said the reason hardly any men want to be priests in Ireland is because of the association with abuse. Apart from infallibly stating the bleeding obvious, how can church bosses, locally and at the Vatican, react?