Saving The Head At The Expense Of The Body Is A Losing Healing Strategy

Muzzling Martin was sole outcome of summit

By John Cooney-Irish Indenpendent- Monday, February 22-2010

A WORTHY dirge was penned by the writer Aubrey de Vere to Owen Roe O'Donnell about the failure of the earls in Kilkenny's Council Hall before their vanquished flight to the continent.
It can be paraphrased in verse about the reining in of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin by Pope Benedict, the curial cardinals and his 23 fellow bishops at last week's Rome summit:

"Pope, Cardinals and bishops, ye talked and talked/In the Vatican's Salla Bologna, such a grand hall;/But this man whose game ya balked/Was the one man 'mong you all!'

The lamentable end to the two-day Rome talks was crystallised on Friday by Maeve Lewis, director of the One in Four abuse victims' support group. She expressed acute disappointment that Archbishop Martin could not say why their concerns, conveyed in an open letter to Pope Benedict, had not been addressed.

Archbishop Martin could not give a straight answer as to why the pope had not accepted unequivocal responsibility for the clerical abuse and cover-up by church authorities detailed in the Murphy report -- nor sought the resignation of Martin Drennan as Bishop of Galway .

It suggests he has been muzzled by the former head of the Vatican's inquisition. The one united voice -- in which the former Joseph Ratzinger ordered the Irish bishops to intone after the Roman summit -- is his own.

It was not by chance that one of the curial cardinals present at the meetings was a legal expert. It was his job to ensure that the Good Shepherd's published text did not contain anything that would subject the Holy See as a sovereign state to legal challenge from abuse victims. (This is most certainly the over riding reason for the Vatican's silence concerning it's own culpability.)

Any admission of the Vatican's culpability in its directives to bishops of reporting abuse complaints would intensify pressure for accountability from the elderly German pope.

Little wonder that victims' groups said Archbishop Martin returned from Rome not as strong in the Irish hierarchy as he was before and that abuse victim Andrew Madden described him as a changed man. (Chastened is probably more accurate. Perhaps he was told to shut up or he would be assigned a Vatican watch dog ala Archbishop Hunthausen.)

A stoic archbishop of Dublin told the abuse survivors that he would be "more optimistic" about the eventual outcome of the "process" of the Irish church's response to the abuse scandals. The next step will see publication in a few weeks' time of Pope Benedict's Lenten letter to the Catholics of Ireland.

But the prominent victims of clerical abuse in the Dublin archdiocese have no expectation whatsoever from this letter. Except for the additional acceptance by the Irish church of mandatory reporting to the gardai and HSE of complaints, the pope will mainly rehash the press release issued last Tuesday.

Archbishop Martin was not underestimating when he warned, before the publication of the Murphy Report, that its findings "would shock us all".

Three months on we have Bishop Drennan openly blaming Archbishop Martin for propelling the resignations of Bishop Donal Murray and Dublin auxiliary, Eamonn Walsh. Now there is talk of the pope declining the resignations of Bishops Walsh and Ray Field. But Bishop Jim Moriarty will step down at Easter.

Over the weekend the Irish bishops proclaimed the coming of the papal letter to the faithful. Yet only Archbishop Martin has offered the wise counsel that the letter may not be exactly what people are expecting.

Archbishop Martin is isolated, but remains the only bishop in real dialogue with victims. However, that dialogue is now firmly within the parameters prescribed by the Pope and "the Episcopal Gang of 24".

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As long as this current Pope lives, Catholics can forget any meaningful admission of culpability by the Vatican when it comes to the systemic policy of covering up sexually abusing priests. Catholics can forget about the Vatican City States ever turning over the approximately two dozen abusers that currently live with in it's walls and are avoiding extradition to other countries. Catholics can forget about experiencing an authority structure which cares about them more than it cares about it's own survival and it's desperate attempts to avoid legal accountability for it's own criminal decisions.

Irish, American, Australian, Canadian, and now German abuse victims know first hand how much they really count to the Vatican. They count only as much as they are perceived to be a threat to the Vatican. Victims can take heart in the fact they must count a lot because the Vatican is bending over backwards to avoid dealing with them on it's own behalf. Can't take a chance on criminal prosecutions and law suits. Can't take a chance on any meaningful real life accountability. Can't admit any mistakes. Mistakes are only made by national episcopacies, not the Vatican. Apparently we are supposed to ignore the fact the national episcopacies all made the exact same criminal mistakes. The Church is only universal when it serves the Vatican's interests. Otherwise it's each episcopate for itself--especially when it comes to legal accountability.

I feel very badly for Archbishop Martin. I saw him as the one bishop who understood the real danger inherent in this crisis might be in setting up a war between the laity and lower clergy with the hierarchy. He really did his best to attempt to get the Irish hierarchy on the same page as the Irish laity. He was succeeding, but it looks as if the Vatican determined in advance that the price of his success was too high for the Vatican to pay--especially over a dieing church in Ireland. Better to heed the advice of Vatican attorneys and stay silent while keeping Vatican eyes focused on the South, on the Philippines, on any place in which the constant use of the sexual morality card still had some authority.

I suspect Archbishop Martin spends some of his time staring at walls, reflecting on where he personally moves from where he's currently positioned. Does he squander his moral authority with the Irish Church in favor of protecting the German pope or does he follow his heart. If he follows his heart he keeps his soul and his moral authority. If he follows the Vatican line he puts another nail in the coffin of Jesus's church in the West. I bet recently his eyes have tracked towards Germany. Will a German bishop take a principled stand or will the Pope's country of origin fall in line, repeating a past German mistake?

There is a kind of karmic dogma which says that those things in your past that you refuse to heal will keep repeating until you finally deal with them and heal them. These situations aren't always about one's own transgressions. Very frequently they are about situations in which one was victimized and just couldn't deal with the situation at the time. Some psychologists think this kind of mechanism is operating in abuse victims who become predators themselves or continue to experience victimhood in other aspects of their lives. Other psychologists would see this as learned behavior, and others as maladaptive neural entrainment.

Sometimes this process gets played out on a very big stage. Institutional Roman Catholicism is currently experiencing this 'karmic' play on a global stage. The strategy of protecting the clergy at the expense of the victims is not a healing strategy. Moving the nexus point up the food chain to protecting the Vatican at the expense of national churches is not a healing strategy. A physician does not keep cutting off various parts of the body strictly to save the head.

Unfortunately Benedict is not a physician nor a healer--not for the church and not for himself. This karmic cycle is going to keep repeating until the lesson is learned and the healing happens. If the Vatican is incapable of learning the lesson it may be that the various national churches cut off the head. And maybe that's the ultimate lesson we all need to learn: the Vatican is not, in fact, the head of the Catholic Church, Jesus is.