CELIBACY needs to be purified, not abandoned, while rigorist notions of
sexuality, gaps in seminary training, triumphalism and clericalism must
be eliminated from Church culture, Canberra-Goulburn Archbishop Mark
Coleridge said in a Pentecost letter on sex abuse.
Archbishop Coleridge, a former chaplain to Pope John Paul II, said the Church’s culture of forgiveness and discretion may have also contributed in part, as the Church struggled to “find the point of convergence between sin and forgiveness on the one hand and crime and punishment on the other”.
“True, sin must be forgiven, but so too must crime be punished,” Archbishop Coleridge said.
“Both mercy and justice must run their course, and do so in a way that converges.”
This relates to how the Church sees her relationship with society more generally, he said – “we are ‘in the world, not of it’ and … the Church insists that it is to God, not to human beings, that final judgement belongs. Yet how does this fit with the need for human judgement when we move within the logic of crime and punishment?”
“We have been slow and clumsy, even at times culpable, in shaping our answers to such questions,” he said.
His 23 May letter coincided with the release by the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference of the document What the Church has done and is doing for safeguarding children and vulnerable persons drafted during the prelates’ mid-May Plenary meeting.
Archbishop Coleridge, who was for a time the public spokesman for the Archdiocese of Melbourne and had to respond to many questions relating to abuse by clergy, said in his letter that the Church may also have “underestimated the power and subtlety of evil”.
“(Offenders) are in the grip of a power which they can, it seems, do little to understand or control; and it is a power which is hugely destructive in the lies of those they have abused and in their own lives,” he said.
Offenders were also “extraordinarily adept” at concealing their abuse, even from confrere they lived with, the Archbishop said, while offenders were often incapable of recognising the grave harm they had done. “The wrong-doing, indeed the crime, was hidden even from them,” he said.
Archbishop Coleridge’s letter described how his understanding of this evil unfolded over the 36 years of his priesthood. He first noticed it in the 1970s when he was a priest in Melbourne, but he thought it was isolated, and even as more cases unravelled in the 80s and 90s, he refused to believe it was a cultural problem in the Church.
A poor understanding of the Church’s teachings on sexuality also contributed to this culture in the Church, Archbishop Coleridge said, while the discipline of celibacy “may also have been attractive to men in whom there were paedophile tendencies which may not have been explicitly recognised by the men themselves when they entered the seminary”.
This misunderstanding of the Church’s teachings on sexuality was mediated in part, he said, through the formative influence of Irish Catholicism in the life of the Church in Australia, as the Church in Ireland had itself been prey to the “rigorist influence” of Jansenism, which promoted the idea that human nature is incapable of good.
Clericalism understood as a hierarchy of power not service, which he also named as a factor in contributing to the Church’s culture which covered up abuse, was the fruit of seminary training that fostered “institutionalised immaturity” by not giving proper human formation and not making it clear that formation is a life-long process, not something that concludes once a priest is ordained. “Seminaries were not always seen as schools of discipleship, since faith was taken for granted”, he said, and clergy could be isolated in ways that “were bound to turn destructive”, especially secular (non-Religious) priests. “The authority proper to the ordained could become authoritarian and the hunger for intimacy proper to human beings could become predatory,” he said.
Had lay people been involved in shaping a response to sex abuse, the Church’s response was unlikely to be as poor, he said.
A major reason, he added, why the Church is providing better responses to abuse cases is due to the involvement of men and women – some non-Catholic. He stressed that clerical celibacy in itself was not a factor, but – like any form of the Christian life lived seriously – “it has its perils”. “When clerical celibacy works well, it is a unique source of spiritual and pastoral fruitfulness in the Church; when it works badly it can be very damaging all round,” he said.
It becomes especially risky, he said, when sundered from the ascetical and mystical life it presumes.
This is an especially large challenge for secular “non-Religious” clergy who do not live in community he added.
While there is much in Catholic culture and tradition of which to be “justifiably proud”, there can be a dark side to this triumphalism which leads to a determination to protect the Church’s reputation at all costs, he said.
It was also perceived that, in its successful social agencies in education, health and welfare, the Church would not be affected as much by the radical social and cultural changes of the 20th century. “Such hubris will always have its consequences,” he said.
The full text of Archbishop Coleridge’s talk can be viewed at http://www.cg.catholic.org.au/about/default.cfm?loadref=86