I avoided reading the news over the weekend to better focus on properly celebrating Easter, so I missed this exchange between two archbishops over the abuse scandal in Ireland:
Archbishop Williams, the head of the worldwide , which claims 70 million adherents, was unusually blunt.
“I was speaking to an Irish friend recently who said that it’s quite difficult in some parts of Ireland to go down the street wearing a clerical collar now,” he said. “And an institution so deeply bound into the life of a society suddenly becoming, suddenly losing all credibility — that’s not just a problem for the church, it’s a problem for everybody in Ireland.”
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Apparently, the suggestion that the Church had lost “all credibility” — especially from a fellow Christian leader, and the day before Easter — was particularly stinging, at least to Dublin’s Archbishop Diarmuid Martin:
“Those working for renewal in the Catholic Church in Ireland did not need this comment on this Easter weekend, and do not deserve it,” Archbishop Martin said in a statement. “The unequivocal and unqualified comment in a radio interview of the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, that the Catholic Church in Ireland has ‘lost all credibility,’ has stunned me.
“I have to say that in all my years as archbishop of Dublin, in difficult times I have rarely felt personally so discouraged as when I woke to hear Archbishop Williams’s comments,” he said.
I can imagine being discouraged by the comments — and I wouldn’t relish being corrected by Archbishop Williams, of all people — but sad to say, I think they’re dead on (which must be most discouraging of all). It reminded me of Deal’s conversation with some lay Catholics in Ireland back in December, in the immediate aftermath following the release of the Murphy Report:
[A]n older couple, Catherine and Victor Spillane, [were] raised in Dublin and Kilarney, respectively. “I remember as a young girl walking to Church, and if a priest walked by, my mother would say, ‘Get on your knees, children!,”‘ Catherine recalled. Then she told me of a priest being spat upon in Dublin over the past weekend. “Now there’s so much disrespect.”
Rev. Darragh Connolly, chaplain of the apostolate, nodded in agreement. “I don’t know if it would be safe to wear my collar in downtown Dublin right now,” he said. A priest for nearly eight years, Father Darragh recalled being in seminary at Maynooth when the Ferns Report came out, which first chronicled the sexual abuse by priests. “There’s a huge amount of pain out there right now about the lack of response by Church leaders to the abuse.”
That sounds like nothing if not a crisis of credibility. Regardless of whether it is fair for the collective Church in Ireland to suffer for the heinous crimes of some of her bishops and priests, it’s happening all the same. Even Archbishop Martin later admitted as much:
“Obviously, the church has lost credibility,” he acknowledged. “But it’s very damaging to those who are trying to restore credibility to be just wiped off with a comment like this.”
It’s one thing to acknowledge your own flaws; to have them pointed out by someone else is never fun. Archbishop Williams might have considered tempering his remarks, but he’s sadly not mistaken.