Mons. Drennan’s article on the Sexual Abuse crisis

Over the past two days I have celebrated a marriage, visited in hospital a husband and father with multiple sclerosis, met with parents to prepare a baptism, and assisted at the funeral of a young man who died under tragic circumstances.  Priesthood is lived amidst the joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of daily life.  And to these moments and episodes the priest brings Christ, in a personal way and in a sacramental way.  It is an extraordinary vocation given to ordinary men.  Often we stumble yet I think I can safely say more often than not we pick up and move on, drawn forward not by prospects of career or success but by the truth and love with which Jesus nurtures us.

Last evening I gathered together various articles and commentaries that I have read concerning the turmoil the Church is currently experiencing.  I had thought I would distil from them something to share with you today.  But I haven’t.  As I sat in my upstairs study looking through the trees towards the Basilica and the city beyond, I was struck by the magnificent beauty of where we are.  It is a beauty founded on order: creation – the fields and trees which surround the Basilica; faith – this living community; and society – the Central Business District of Christchurch, all woven together in a fragile, often-threatened, whole.  In contrast, what I had just read was like a collage of ugliness.  It was an ugliness reflecting disorder: half truths and half lies, fragmentation, suspicion, broken trust and shattered lives. I could have chased the half truths or even lies perpetuated at times in the media with counter claims but that would only have added to the ugliness, cheapened the complexity of what we face.  Instead I reflected on my own wanderings through priesthood, recalled the priests I have met over the years – many outstanding in holiness and wisdom some less than edifying priests – and prayed for a strengthened resolve to be faithful in my service to you.

When I was in Rome I was deeply immersed in the Holy Father’s response to the situation we face.  I can say I know more about this than any other New Zealander.  I have been intimately involved with his apologies, of which there have been many, not as an exercise in words but having sought to be absorbed by the tragedies we face.  This is not the time to go into detail but I would like to make just two concrete points.  Firstly, prior to his election as Pope more than any other curial cardinal Josef Ratzinger acknowledged, confronted, and sought to respond to the cases of abuse.  If there was any criticism directed at Ratzinger during those years it was not that he did too little to confront this problem but that he did too much: due legal process was curtailed leaving the accused underserved, some claimed, by the new streamlined canonical procedure.  Secondly, contrary to what a recent Press editorial suggested, canon law never sits in opposition to a nation’s own legislation: canon law assumes that criminal cases of abuse, in other words every case of abuse against a minor, are always referred to the police.  That this fact has been posted recently on the Vatican website does not mean that such an understanding didn’t exist before; it is a reiteration not an addendum. 

I clarify these two points knowing the embarrassment and shame you must be feeling if you have presumed that what has been reported in the media is true.  In these two matters it is not.  But let me hasten to admit that I fully share in the shame and embarrassment and anger at the way many cases were handled which smacked of a warped understanding of loyalty, bungled ecclesial leadership and an arrogant clericalism which spoke more of pagan tribalism than Christian discipleship.

Some say we have a PR disaster. On one level that is palpably true. But is this a question of PR?  If the Vatican public relations machinery ran smoothly would that be enough?  We are in the middle of a crisis for all society – the trivialization of sexuality.  It is driven by the entertainment industry of which the media is a subset.  The most blatant and damaging form of this crisis is the turning of human beings into objects and it is most vile when those human beings are children.  As Christians we must respond not with PR but with witness.  Witness is real, witness is behaviour born of attitudes, ideals and faith.  In that light I do find myself saying to friends, I cannot change the past but I can influence the now, so tell me an organization that today has better child protection policies and procedures than the Catholic Church.  If it exists we will incorporate its practices.

Let us pray for each other and in a special way today for the Pope and for all priests that we may grow in humility the mother of all virtues.

Monsignor Charles Drennan.