UK > History > 2011 > Ireland (I)

Irish Rupture With Vatican

Sets Off a Transformation

September 17, 2011
The New York Times
By SARAH LYALL

DUBLIN — Even as it remains preoccupied with its struggling economy, Ireland is in the midst of a profound transformation, as rapid as it is revolutionary: it is recalibrating its relationship to the Roman Catholic Church, an institution that has permeated almost every aspect of life here for generations.

This is still a country where abortion is against the law, where divorce became legal only in 1995, where the church runs more than 90 percent of the primary schools and where 87 percent of the population identifies itself as Catholic. But the awe, respect and fear the Vatican once commanded have given way to something new — rage, disgust and defiance — after a long series of horrific revelations about decades of abuse of children entrusted to the church’s care by a reverential populace.

While similar disclosures have tarnished the Vatican’s image in other countries, perhaps nowhere have they shaken a whole society so thoroughly or so intensely as in Ireland. And so when the normally mild-mannered prime minister, Enda Kenny, unexpectedly took the floor in Parliament this summer to criticize the church, he was giving voice not just to his own pent-up feelings, but to those of a nation.

His remarks were a ringing declaration of the supremacy of state over church, in words of outrage and indignation that had never before been used publicly by an Irish leader.

“For the first time in Ireland, a report into child sexual abuse exposed an attempt by the Holy See to frustrate an inquiry into a sovereign, democratic republic as little as three years ago, not three decades ago,” Mr. Kenny said, referring to the Cloyne Report, which detailed abuse and cover-ups by church officials in southern Ireland through 2009.

Reiterating the report’s claim that the church had encouraged bishops to ignore child-protection guidelines the bishops themselves had adopted, the prime minister attacked “the dysfunction, the disconnection, the elitism” that he said “dominate the culture of the Vatican.”

He continued: “The rape and torture of children were downplayed, or ‘managed,’ to uphold instead the primacy of the institution — its power, its standing and its reputation.” Instead of listening with humility to the heartbreaking evidence of “humiliation and betrayal,” he said, “the Vatican’s response was to parse and analyze it with the gimlet eye of a canon lawyer.”

The effect of his speech was instant and electric.

“It was a seminal moment,” said Patsy McGarry, the religious affairs correspondent for The Irish Times. “No Irish prime minister has ever talked to the Catholic Church before in this fashion. The obsequiousness of the Irish state toward the Vatican is gone. The deference is gone.”

While both sides are talking in more emollient terms now, there is no question that Mr. Kenny’s declaration deeply angered the Vatican. It immediately withdrew its ambassador from Dublin, ostensibly to help fashion the Vatican’s formal response. (The ambassador has since been reassigned to the Czech Republic.)

The position of Irish ambassador to the Vatican is currently vacant, too, and there is talk here of merging it with the ambassadorship to Italy. While government officials say the question is part of a general re-examination of the diplomatic budget, such a move would be seen as a pointed snub to the Holy See, a sovereign state to which countries generally dedicate separate embassies.

Meanwhile, in what has developed into a tit-for-tat war of words, the church’s latest formal communication with Dublin — 24 pages of densely argued prose — took issue with both the Cloyne Report and Mr. Kenny’s remarks, saying that a crucial document had been “misrepresented” by the inquiry and calling “unsubstantiated” Mr. Kenny’s assertion that the Vatican had tried to “frustrate an inquiry” into the abuse scandal.

Sympathizers with the church’s position say the Vatican made valid and nuanced points. And they say Mr. Kenny went too far. “Personally, I think it was excessive,” David Quinn, founder of the Iona Institute, a right-leaning religious advocacy group, said of the prime minister’s speech.

In an interview, Mr. Quinn said that the relationship between the Vatican and the Irish government was “at a very low ebb.” The state of affairs had not been helped by the fact that newspapers in China, he said, had written editorials using Mr. Kenny’s remarks as an argument for “why the church should be under government control.”

Mr. Kenny, who took office in March after the long-dominant Fianna Fail party imploded over the financial crisis, has been accused of opportunism by some critics. But his position as a practicing Catholic from a conservative area helped give moral weight to his speech. And his government’s feisty new tone has been met with widespread approval in a place that feels doubly betrayed: first by the abuse itself, and second by what many see as a cover-up by the church, compounded by the often opaque, legalistic language with which it defends itself.

“You can talk about the finesse of diplomatic ties and maneuverings, but what Kenny was actually saying was that you have to prioritize the victims of abuse, and you have to assert very loudly that this is a republic and civil law has to take precedence over canon law,” said Diarmaid Ferriter, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin.

While most people have not abandoned their religion, many seem to have abandoned the habit of practicing it. The archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, recently estimated that only 18 percent of the Catholics in his archdiocese attended Mass every week.

The government has announced that it will introduce a package of new legislation to protect children from abuse and neglect, including a law — considered but rejected as too contentious by previous governments — that would make it mandatory to report evidence of crimes to the authorities. It has also established a group to examine how to remove half of the country’s Catholic primary schools from church control.

In a recent interview, Eamon Gilmore, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said that Ireland had asserted its role as a “modern democracy.”

No longer would the church enjoy its previous privileges and powers as in times past, when it, with the government’s collusion, “effectively dictated the social policy of the state,” he said.

“Historically, there was a view within the Catholic Church that there was a parallel law, that they had their own system of law, and that was the law to which they were accountable,” Mr. Gilmore said. “At a minimum, that blurred the understanding of the necessity for full compliance with the law of the state.”

He added: “The Catholic Church is perfectly entitled to have its own view and its one rule and to view matters according to its own light. But this is a republic. And there is one law.”

When it comes to protecting children, Mr. Gilmore said, “Everybody in the state — irrespective of whether they’re ordinary citizens doing everyday work, or a priest or a bishop — has to comply with the law.”

 

Douglas Dalby contributed reporting.

    Irish Rupture With Vatican Sets Off a Transformation, NYT, 17.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/world/europe/ireland-recalibrates-ties-to-roman-catholic-church.html

Vatican Rebukes Ireland Over Abuse Cases

September 3, 2011
The New York Times
By RACHEL DONADIO

VATICAN CITY — In a strong rebuke to the Irish government, the Vatican said Saturday that it had never discouraged Irish bishops from reporting the sexual abuse of minors to the police and dismissed claims that it had undermined efforts to investigate abuse as “unfounded.”

The Vatican’s statement was the latest salvo in a tense diplomatic standoff since the Irish government released a report in July accusing the Vatican of encouraging bishops to ignore guidelines requiring them to report abuse cases to civil authorities.

Days later, Prime Minister Enda Kenny assailed the Vatican as trying to block an inquiry into sexual abuse by priests and placing its interests ahead of protecting children, prompting the Vatican to recall its ambassador.

In its first public statement on the issue since then, the Vatican said Saturday that it “understands and shares the depth of public anger and frustration at the findings” of the July report, “which found expression in the speech” by Mr. Kenny. But it said both the report and the speech hinged on a “misinterpretation” of a key letter.

The Vatican also dismissed as “unfounded” a statement by the Irish Parliament that the Vatican’s intervention “contributed to the undermining of the child protection framework and guidelines of the Irish state and Irish bishops.”

The July report, the fourth in a series of scathing Irish government reports into sexual abuse by priests and evidence of a widespread cover-up, found that clergy members in the rural diocese of Cloyne had not acted on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to as recently as 2009. The guidelines adopted by Irish bishops in 1996 required that abuse cases be reported to the police.

The report pointed a finger at Rome for encouraging bishops to ignore the reporting guidelines.

The report cited a confidential letter to the bishops of Ireland from the Vatican ambassador in 1997, in which he said that he had “serious reservations” about the child-protection guidelines, and that they violated canon law.

The Cloyne Report said that letter “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy.”

The Vatican said Saturday that the letter had been misinterpreted. Taken out of context, the Vatican statement said, the letter could generate “understandable criticism.” But the Vatican said the bishops had defined the child-protection policies as an “advisory document” and had never sought to make them legally binding by asking the Vatican to incorporate them into canon law, as bishops in the United States had done.

The Vatican added that in Ireland, bishops were “free to apply the penal measures of canon law to offending priests,” and that they had “never been impeded under canon law from reporting cases of abuse to the civil authorities.”

The Vatican also dismissed as “unsubstantiated” Mr. Kenny’s assertions that the Vatican had tried to “frustrate an inquiry” into the sexual abuse scandal. The Vatican said the Cloyne Report “contains no evidence to suggest that the Holy See meddled in the internal affairs of the Irish State, or, for that matter, was involved in the day-to-day management of Irish dioceses or religious congregations with respect to sexual abuse issues.”

Deputy Prime Minister Eamon Gilmore, who also is foreign minister, described the Vatican response as “legalistic and technical,” and said he held firm to the view that the Vatican had interfered in the affairs of a sovereign, democratic state. The 1997 letter, he said in a statement, “provided a pretext for some to avoid full cooperation with the Irish civil authorities.”

Terrance McKiernan, the president of Bishop Accountability, which monitors sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, said that the Vatican’s response “shows that the Vatican is still in denial.”

Irish government investigations have found that thousands of children were abused in state-run Catholic boarding schools from the 1930s to the 1990s. But dioceses often moved predatory priests to new posts where they continued to abuse children, the government found, rather than turn them over to the police.

For years, bishops worldwide have cited widespread confusion about how to discipline errant priests. In the past, some high-ranking Vatican officials said that bishops should protect priests, not police them, while others sought a balance between respect for canon law and protecting children. Only with the explosion of a new sexual abuse scandal in Europe last year has the Vatican stepped up its efforts to clarify its procedures.

The Vatican statement on Saturday also suggested that the Irish government should share the blame for the sexual abuse cases. The statement noted that Irish law still did not require mandatory reporting of suspected abuse by clergy members to the police, even though the issue was debated in the mid-1990s.

“Given that the Irish government of the day decided not to legislate on the matter, it is difficult to see how” the Vatican’s “letter to the Irish bishops, which was issued subsequently, could possibly be constructed as having somehow subverted Irish law or undermined the Irish state in its efforts to deal with the problem in question,” the Vatican said.

The Irish Parliament is now debating a controversial law that would make failure to report allegations of abuse to civil authorities punishable with jail time.

There was one part of the Vatican statement on Saturday that the Irish government did welcome.

“The Holy See is sorry and ashamed for the terrible sufferings which the victims of abuse and their families have had to endure within the Church of Jesus Christ,” the statement said, “a place where this should never happen.”

 

Douglas Dalby contributed reporting from Dublin.

    Vatican Rebukes Ireland Over Abuse Cases, NYT, 3.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/04/world/europe/04vatican.html

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