Like the Rape of Christ

Last May, I was at the Guardian Hay Festival listening to Colm O’Gorman on the behaviour of the Catholic Church and its response to the child abuse scandal... and this was what he called it “Like the Rape of Christ Himself”.

Colm O’ Gorman is a man of unassuming looks, who wouldn’t stand out if you crossed him on the Tube. But listen to him and you get a hint of the trauma that he’s been through... Colm grew up in an Irish village where the parish priest regularly abused him. It was very difficult to explain to his mother why he wouldn’t visit the priest and help him, when it was almost a moral obligation for young Catholics do so. Sometimes when the priest came to collect him for “volunteer” duties, he would refuse to come down and his mother would try her best to convince him to go and help out – she found this weird because he was normally a well behaved child.

Unable to put up with this, he broke off contact with family for over 4 years, “kept running” as he said and ended up in London. It was only in 1995 that he went back to Ireland and told his sister what had happened. What spurred him to action was a chat on the phone when his sister remarked that she’d seen the priest at a marriage and that he had a lot of young boys around him... that’s when he knew he had to something and within 6 weeks he was back in Ireland.

The Need Not To Hear, Not To Listen | He spoke about how receiving such brutal news could be traumatic for people who had grown up with the Church as a pillar of their life: “the need not to hear, not to listen to this terribly destructive experience”... Indeed, when a friend tried to tell his mother about how a priest had abused her son, she was so disturbed that she got up and throttled him, as if to hold him by the throat would prevent such a thing from happening.

And in one sense, this was what the Church was also struggling with… and coping by denying the existence of a serious issue: out of 4 bishops who resigned in Ireland, only 2 were allowed to go. He shared an example of what happened to a priest who abused boys in a group in a Boy Scout training session; while the Scouts banned him for life, the church made him a priest. An escalation of the issue to the Papal Nuncio (ambassador) of Ireland in 1987 earned a callous response: "The Holy See is aware of your concerns". And so the priest continued to abuse until Colm complained to the police and the priest was finally arrested in 1995.

It is difficult to imagine the very personal trauma of being abused… Colm wondered about how it would feel to confess your sins to a man who has raped you? He gave the horrific example of a priest who abused a nun, arranged for abortion when she got pregnant and when she died of medical complications, officiated over her funeral.

A Secular Conspiracy| He went on to show how the sub-text of every communication from the Vatican detracted from the primary issue…

• ...somehow the corruption of the society was part of the problem…
  
• ...somehow it was a secular conspiracy against the Church…
  
• ...it was the result of celibacy…

Since when does celibacy (or the lack of it or anything else, for God’s sake) allow a man to go out and rape a child?

At the end of his interactions with the Church, he had to conclude that the Catholic Church had been morally corrupt in dealing with the situation… an institution that was supposed to stand up for truth, love, pursuit of justice was shielding rapists against the justice, against the rights of victims. And by ignoring the cries of victims and abetting this behavior, the Church was almost abetting the rape of Christ (Mathew 25:45, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least among you, you did not do for me”)

I found it a very disturbing, stark and almost gimmicky comparison… but think about it, maybe not too far from the truth. All the AIDs clinics that the church builds, all the priests and nuns who slog thanklessly in jungles and deserts, all the schools and colleges that have fed a hungry mind… the goodness of all such outstanding acts of courage and faith go waste in the face of the Church leadership’s utter cowardice in obfuscating these crimes.

Creating an opportunity to prey| In the Q& A session after the speech, a social worker explained how her organization realized that if there weren't enough checks in place, enough empathy in listening to victims and enough measures to apply against criminals, you would become an organization that attracts paedophiles, because this is how they find opportunity and prey... And she felt that the Church was in danger of going down that route.

Colm agreed with this and added that that there had been several petitions submitted to the Vatican but it still refused to put in place mandatory child protection policies. If this was possible in England, which enjoys good standards of freedom of speech and law enforcement, he wondered what would be the case in Philippines or Brazil or other developing countries where people are more vulnerable and the Church has more authority. An example he quoted: In Brazil, a priest regularly abused a kid from a favela; when the grandmother complained, the Bishop ex-communicated her and tried to suppress the issue. But it was only when they realized that everyone teased the victim as the priest’s “little wife” and when they discovered a diary with details of whom to target and how to abuse, that the priest was finally arrested.

In his closing remarks, Colm insisted that the State cannot abdicate responsibility...it needs to ask questions and not let the Church dodge responsibility.

I wonder…| What men are these, that lurk in the corners of churches... and what men are those that allowed them to prey on children? My High St. Kensington parish priest took great pride in booming across the pews at mass: that abusers constituted only 0.4% of the total priest population and most parishioners clapped their hands as if this somehow constituted a remarkable achievement. Since when does rape get sanction, go unpunished or become justified because such an ugliness occurs only rarely? (A questionable statistic considering the Church’s lack of transparency in the issue).

No one takes issue with the 0.4% statistic or with the truly noble work done by the Mother Teresas and Father Damiens of the Church… but when Bishops, Cardinals and the Pope himself turn a blind eye to acts of evil under their roofs, I wonder if Colm had it right there: like the rape of Christ Himself.

Notes

• Colm O'Gorman's "Beyond Belief" is available (with a needlessly sensational subtitle - "The Story of the Boy Who sued the Pope") from Amazon for GBP4.89 here.
• Image sourced from a Telegraph article about Colm O'Gorman here