Cardinal Sin

I'm not an admirer of Cardinal Sean Brady. I'm not a hater of him either. He no has doubt some positive qualities. He is clearly an educated man, with a Doctorate in Canon Law. He is a man of deep faith: but he's in deep trouble. And he did not get to the top in the Irish hierarchy, merely because he looks good in scarlet. So how come he's managed to make a monkey of being the Primate? The reasons are as clear as they are complex.

Cardinal Brady

Sean Brady was involved in an 'investigation' of abuse allegations against Fr. Brendan Smyth so half-assed, so insulting to Smyth's victims, that nearly four decades on, it's still a potent source of anger toward the clergy. The scandal as it erupted in the early 1990's defined the rupture between the church and its congregation. Whereas Eamon Casey had been a scandal which exposed an almost comical duplicity and hypocrisy within the hierarchy, the handling of Smyth exposed the chilling manner in which the church chose to abuse it faithful: be it their trust, their obedience or their children, the Catholic Church ran roughshod over not only those who questioned them and those who would follow them.

It's strange to think that in the twenty years since Smyth infamously eyeballed photographers as he was led away by prison guards, that the almost cartoonish and grotesque villainy of Smyth was not enough for the Church to want to clean house and open up. The reaction at the time was enormous. The amusement around Eamon Casey soon became horror with the emergence of Smyth. All the while, the church did as it does. Nothing.

The social upheaval of the early 1990's brought about astonishingly little real change. The majority still go to mass, as is their right, and with which I have no quibble. Priests are still reasonably respected figures in their communities. The churches are still the dominant interested parties in Irish education, causing everything in schools to revolve around either religion or sex. And despite Ruari Quinn's desire to change, how much really will for a new social ideology other than the ideology of making do with dwindling resources. There are compelling reasons why real change is a long way off.

As a child growing up, I was quite unaware of the Church's waning power, because I was not bought up in that tradition of 'deference' to the hierarchy that appears to be the cause of the then Father Brady's subordinating of his common morality to his duties as an officer of the Church. I'll return to this again, but what I'd mention first is a personal memory: I remember that my father, then being Father Trendy on the television, was not to everyone's liking. His act was 'blasphemy' to some. I think we even received some hate mail. Not, however, from the clergy, but from lay people. The clergy saved their ammunition when it came to Dermot Morgan for later when he died. At the time he was on the Live Mike, he pulled up the blinds to let new, uncomfortable light shine on Ireland. Most of all, however, he liberated his family from the mental connection between subservience to the Churchmen and well practiced Catholicism.

This was the exception however and not the rule. The Irish happily revel in shouting about their rebellion: they won't pay the household charge (even when they aren't liable to), or fork out €50 for their septic tank (even when they don't have one). We claim to harbour a sneaking regard for those who play fast and loose with the law for their own gain. We are an beneath it all, a servile people. The protests over the IMF/EU bailout are not mass uprisings. An officer of the law will still get a timid 'yes, Guard' when stopping a wayward driver. When the taxman cometh, most cough up. So it was with the British, and so it was with the Catholic Church.

We are recidivist Conservatives, allowing pregnant schoolgirls to be refused an education until we remember which century we're supposed to be living in. When the ugliness of our everyday cowardice is exposed, the perpetrator is protected to save ourselves from our own complicity. Child abuse, the dirtiest of all Ireland's little secrets, therefore remained unreported, the abusers unchallenged. The victims were afflicted with stigma, the families were fearful of shame. The desire for certainty, which the church offered after independence, was seized upon by the faithful and exploited by their supposed moral guardians.

So what of Sean Brady? Resignation is the least of his worries. Morally he's incapable of coming up with the goods. He can't apologise without making it about his anguish. Society doesn't care about that. It's not about co-opting victimhood to make you feel better. When you've wronged someone, the hardest thing to say is sorry and mean it for purely unselfish reasons. For a man of such ability as he must be, he appears imbued with such an ego, albeit an institutionally defined ego, that means he could attempt to avoid taking responsibility for his actions and those of the Church. That manner of apology, and the real atonement that would inevitably follow, is too much for him and the hierarchy, with a few notable exceptions. When that happens, Irish society as a whole can start the real process of self examination about child abuse that we have never had to guts to engage with: to liberate ourselves from the timidity and the Juju of our ancestors and to define our relationship with God in a real and heartfelt way.