Reluctant Irishman

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The Vatican Rag

The title is from the hilarious song by Tom Lehrer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f72CTDe4-0

It must be over 10 years ago - certainly after revelations physical and sexual abuse by clerics in Ireland started to emerge but equally before the full extent of such abuses  became apparent - that I recall hearing journalist Jim Duffy, tell a story on a Sunday radio chat show about a priest who ventured into the classroom of his parish school seeking volunteer altar boys. Following his recruitment pitch, a number of boys put up their hands. Pleased with the response, the priest said that all that was necessary was that they get notes of permission from their parents. What happened, though, was that, without exception, all the parents concerned sent back notes the next day telling the priest to keep his hands off their children.

Jim Duffy wasn't suggesting that the parents knew something about the priest that he didn't. Nor was he defending the church. He was simply telling the story to indicate the extent of the mistrust that had arisen towards clerics and the way that apparently innocent clerics became victims of this.

The story stayed in my memory. Over the previous three decades, I had disagreed strongly with the church on homosexuality, contraception, divorce and (latterly) abortion. I was angry with them for the way they held up progress on these issues in Irish society and even (though this was before my time) blocked a universal health care scheme for mothers and young children. During those years, on an almost weekly basis there would be media stories of people - mostly women - who were hounded by the church or by the wider conservative society that supported it. Although I was never a victim of abuse, I did meet some clerics who were arrogant, bigoted or otherwise nasty. And, of course, although I did go through a phase of trying to practice catholicism, I lost my religion by the time I was about 21.

On the other hand, I also knew priests, nuns, brothers and novices who were decent people. Of course, I had difficulty reconciling this with some of their views but, after all, I had strong views on Northern Ireland, the Middle East and other issues that weren't shared by all my friends. None of us can find friends that we agree with on everything all of the time and some of the points of disagreement are on very serious issues.

One priest that I knew slightly from my student days was, ultimately, a casualty of the abuse scandals. That was Father Donal Moriarty, an exceptionally gentle and diffident man who was head chaplain for a time in University College Dublin. He rose afterwards to the rank of bishop of Kildare but in 2009 he was criticised by an independent enquiry for failing to pursue adequately allegations that were made against certain priests in Dublin when he was an auxilliary bishop there. He resigned, ackowledging that he had "failed to challenge the prevailing culture". However, looking at what happened to priests who did challenge culture, one has to acknowledge that it would have taken exceptional courage to do so. Priests were transferred to remote isolated postings or even silenced for showing such courage. 


The Vatican accepted Bishop Moriarty's resignation and that of one other bishop at the time. It declined two more, while a fifth bishop that dug in his heels and refused to resign was not forced out. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, one of the few senior members of the hierarchy who comes out of these scandals with an enhanced reputation, had pushed for these resignations and was left high and dry by the Vatican's lack of support.

That was three years ago. In the last few months, Ireland's cardinal was implicated in the abuse scandals, when it emerged that, as long ago as the 1970s, he knew of abuses by the notorious Father Brendan Smith (whose subsequent conviction in Northern ireland the early nineties really opened the floodgates, after it emerged that the then Attorney General in Dublin had stonewalled on efforts to exstradite him to that jurisdiction). Not only did Brady allow himself be fobbed off by the leadership of Father Smith's Norbertine order (who, in the meantime, silenced another priest for trying to expose Father Smith) but he made the child victims swear an oath of secrecy. Cardinal Brady has refused to resign and the Vatican is not pushing him (partly because, according to observers, they don't see any suitable replcement on the horizon). 

One might think that, with all of this egg on its face (not to mention leaks and scandals on the ongoing power games at the top), the Vatican might have learned to be less cocksure of itself in terms of laying down the law regarding the old chestnuts of divorce, contraception and homosexuality. The pope and his advisors might have realised that, whatever status their beliefs confer on their institution, they are still human and can fail, so they should not judge others. If that were the case they would think twice about trying to bully priests who, they believe, are deviating from approved teaching on controversial issues such as contraception.

Not a bit of it, though. While failing to deal effectively with abuse scandals in Ireland - and even facilitating tmoves by the Unitied States hierachy to put its assets beyond reach of litigation - the Vatican has had no problem about censuring American nuns for paying too much attention to social issues and not enough to Catholic doctrine on homosexuality and contraception. In Ireland, Father Brian Darcy, a gentle and well-liked priest who makes frequent appearances on radio and television, and writes for a Sunday newspaper, has been instructed to pass all of his public utterances to Rome for prior clearance.

What this points to is the fact that, whatever the Bible or Catholic teaching says, the Church has an à la carte approach about which rules it will enforce to the hillt and which ones it will equivocate over. This shouldn't be surprising; it has been the same over much bigger political and moral issues.

In the past, the Vatican has claimed credit for being a strong voice against communism. It didn't hesitate to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, which resulted in persecution of its clergy (nor should it have). The previous pope is given some of the credit for the collapse of communism, first in his native Poland and then elsewhere in Europe (how much credit he deserves is a matter of debate but he certainly had influence). All of this would redound to its credit, were it not for the fact that the Vatican has been much more equivocal about right-wing tyrannies. Going back to its Faustian pact with Mussolini, its silence towards the Nazi regime (despite its clerics being persecuted there too) and its support for Franco and Salazar, it has taken an approach of either strong support, silence or, at best, muted condemnation, towards right-wing tyrannies that is at odds with its grandstanding over commmunism and over sexual morality. In Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s clerics protesting against murderous juntas, such as Archbishop Romero in El Salvador, received little hierarchical support even when many - including Romero - were murdered. Meanwhile, a church that routinely refused communion to remarried couples had no problem about giving it to murderers like Pinochet. When a brutal military regime took power in Haiti, the Vatican had the distinction of being the only country in the world to recognise it. 

Another instance of these routine double standards was when the present pope beatified hundreds of clerics who were murdered by Republicans in the Spanish Civil War but did not extend the same honour to the priests and other religious - mainly in the Basque Country - who were murdrered by Franco's forces. The previous pope even considered beatifying Queen Isabella of Spain but at least he had the wisdom to desist in the face of protests from Moslems and Sephardic Jews, who have not forgotten her crimes against their co-religionists. 

Religious observance among baptised Catholics is plummeting, parish incomes are drying up, priests face undeserved insults and slights in their day-to-day work, churches are vandalised or lie empty. And yet the corrupt leadership in Rome carries on exactly as it did when it had a much larger following that could bring much more weight to bear in the national politics of its respective countries.


The sad thing, returning to the story of the priest at recruiting altar boys, is that most rank and file clerics are decent men and women who are trying to do the right thing by themselves and others. They are as much the victims of this rotten institution as anyone else.


Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Cartoons in words

Back in February, I was taking a break during a work meeting when a colleague asked me what I was doing for Dickens's birthday. I replied that, coincidentally, I happened to be reading Nicholas Nickleby for the first time. As you might guess, his response was that he had just been making small talk and hadn't really expected a serious answer.

Nevertheless, Dickens's 200 birthday this year was a big event, with much coverage in the media and the production of a new dramatization of his last, unfinished novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by the BBC.

Important anniversaries of deceased artistic figures are often occasions for adulatory and uncritical traetment of their legacies. This is particularly the case when, despite some astounding achievements, they also created much that was second-rate or their careers were controversial for other reasons. I recall the same with the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth (that's for another day).

In this regard, people (especially the English) have an affection for Dickens as a father figure in a way that they do not have for, say, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy. Equally, though, he has his detractors. His novels are often criticised for being poorly structured and sentimental.

There are grounds for both of these criticisms. In this respect, the above-mentioned Nicholas Nickleby is a case in point. The story wanders up numerous blind alleys and it is, at times, insufferably mawkish. Smike, in particular, is hard for a modern reader to sympathise with (I breathed a sigh of relief when he croaked it!). The excuse, moreover, that it was an early work, ignores the fasc that his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, remains one of his best. Of course it also has structural weaknesses - indeed, it highlights a problem with all of the novels; that they were first written as serials.

One thing that Nicholas Nickleby did achieve, however, was the highlighting of the appalling conditions that prevailed in many private schools - in Yorkshire in particular. All of Dickens's books, to a greater or lesser extent, address social ills and were instrumental in remedying some of them - including public executions and debtors' prisons. This might not be a reason for reading them now (if anything it dates them).

However, the best of the books of his that I have read (and I have read 10 so far) display other fine qualities. They can be very funny, with the humour ranging from verbal slapstick to biting satire. But above all, it's Dickens's characters - or, rather, one might say "caricatures" - that really make the best of his books stand out. Micawber and Mister Dick in David Copperfield, Fagin in Oliver Twist, are well-know enxamples. However, my favourites are Inspector Bucket, the canny policeman of Bleak House (ably played in the BBC adaptation by Alun Armstrong), the open-hearted Noddy Boffin,in Our Mutual Friend, who proves to be nobody's fool (brought to life for the BBC again by Peter Vaughan), Sam Weller (of course!) in The Pickwick Papers who, likewise, hides a formidable brain behind a clownish exterior, and, above all, the loathsome but hilarious Seth Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (again, Tom Wilkinson gave the performance of his life in this role for the BBC). None of these characters are realistic portrayals, though they all contain elements of real people. Rather, they are grotesques, caricatures or, as I would like to think, cartoons in words.

No other English writer combined Dickens's comic gift with his ability to create such memorable caricatures. One has to go to America (Mark Twain) or Russia (Nikolai Gogol) to find anything like the same humour combined with caricature and a sense of the picturesque. And for this Dickens deserves to be remembered.