I was in Ireland on Sunday when I opened The Observer, and read that the man whose obituaries last year called him “one of England’s best-known parish priests” turns out to have been a predatory paedophile.
How many more shocks can the system take, I wondered aloud to my Irish friends. They looked surprised. Like so many of their countrymen and -women, they have lost the capacity to be shocked by the activities of Roman Catholic priests and the response of the institutional Church to them. They shrugged their shoulders, as, one said, “many Catholics and post-Catholics would.”
Post-Catholics? Apparently, so many people have left the Church that a new sociological term has been coined in Ireland for those who have abandoned their religious practice, but cling to a cultural identity, in a country where, notwithstanding all the progress of the peace process, there remains a significant consciousness of denomination as a tribal badge.
This week, a national forum in Ireland has been discussing a proposal by the Minister for Education, Ruairi Quinn, that half the primary schools under the control of the Church should be transferred to the jurisdiction of other bodies. Representatives of the RC bishops have been taking a tougher line than their Archbishop. But a counter-proposal by the Catholic School Partnership that only ten per cent of schools should switch from church control appeared to concede the principle that change was needed.
Roman Catholics in England and Wales are nowhere near so far down the path of disillusion. Even so, each new disclosure is a blow to the confidence and morale of many Catholics I know. “Every time, a little bit of you dies inside,” one said. Each revelation may be the final straw for someone. One acquaintance recently left the Church to become an Anglican.
On Tuesday, a BBC1 investigation revealed that Fr Kit Cunningham, the parish priest of England’s oldest Roman Catholic church, St Etheldreda’s, in Ely Place, London, was part of a group of priests from the Rosminian order involved in sexual abuse at boarding schools in England and Africa in the 1960s and ’70s.
Peter Stanford, a former editor of the Catholic Herald, wrote a confessional piece in The Observer last weekend saying he now felt ashamed of a laudatory obituary of Fr Cunningham which he had written when the priest died in December. Many such glowing pieces were written about this creepy cleric, who was well-known to Fleet Street journalists. But Mr Stanford noted that he now felt not only betrayed, but also complicit in a culture of cover-up and denial of abuse. It shakes your faith, he said.
Some might say that the abuse is long past. But, last September, Pope Benedict XVI visited the UK and expressed “my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes”. Yet, at the same time, the Rosminian order was busy writing to the people whose lives it had scarred, refusing to pay compensation for what it accepted were offences by four of its priests.
Even after that, the Rosminian Provincial, Fr David Meyers, who knew the extent of the damage that Fr Cunningham had done to children in his care, shockingly held a hagiographic memorial service for the priest. Such behaviour can do nothing other than cast doubt upon the Pope’s promises of a new openness and accountability. How long might it be, one wonders, before the term post-Catholic enters the vocabulary in England, too?