Opinion

Patrick Murphy: Pope's visit was sadly another missed opportunity

ANOTHER missed opportunity to restore confidence in the Catholic Church - that, sadly, is the story of the Pope's visit to Ireland.

Although he boosted his own personal popularity and left many moved by his visit, Pope Francis left us wondering whether he is unwilling to lead a process of change in the Church, or if he heads an organisation which is inherently incapable of reform.

Either way, his failure to identify or specify new systems and structures to tackle clerical child sex abuse suggests that the Church will continue towards self-destruction. When the excitement of his visit fades away, we will be left with the same old Church - and it will be left with the same old problems.

Although he offered fine words in private to some abuse victims, in public he was left trailing by others.

Father Patrick McCafferty, for example, pointed out that the continuous "drip drip" of disturbing revelations over the past 30 years was hindering the Church's capacity to undertake its mission. They should have been the Pope's words.

Leo Varadkar spoke forcefully about the need for zero tolerance for those who abuse children or facilitate that abuse and demanded that actions must flow from the Church's words of repentance. That should have been in the Pope's speech.

Varadkar came across as caring. The Pope sounded like a politician, especially when he spoke of the pain and shame of the "Catholic community" over clerical child sex abuse. This suggested that all Catholics somehow shared a common responsibility for the Church's crimes.

He appeared to be attempting to deflect the Vatican's responsibility, by copying David Cameron's "We are all in this together" as an explanation for social and economic inequality.

His reluctance or unwillingness to adequately identify how he intends to tackle clerical child sex abuse was well telegraphed in advance. A Vatican spokesperson told RTÉ on Friday that within the Church, child abuse was a "cultural problem".

Did he mean that child abuse was part of the Church's culture? If so, that would categorise Catholicism as a cult rather than a Church. If not, what exactly did he mean, particularly since he also said that in view of the difficulties in changing a culture, this one could not be changed overnight?

The Pope's description of abusers as "filth" merely repeated the sentiments of Pope Benedict XVI in Rome in 2005 and although he said some old things in a new way, he failed to say new things.

This reflects the Church's apparent belief that adherence to its civil responsibilities will somehow dilute its ecclesiastical authority. Why else is it dragging its feet?

This inward-looking approach reveals a remarkable failure to understand that true authority can only come from respect and that respect is something which has to be earned, rather than a religious obligation which can be imposed from above.

On becoming Pope in 2013, Francis said that dealing with child sex abuse was one of his priorities. Since then the problem has become significantly worse, but in Ireland he offered nothing new on, for example, his response to the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report about the clerical abuse of possibly thousands of children in a single US state.

So while the Pope's visit will have given new hope and encouragement to thousands of Irish Catholics and will have changed the lives of many of the faithful, what was needed was an indication that the Church itself will change.

A compassionate and caring pope is an encouraging step towards that change, but without radical reorganisation within the Church, his difficulty, as reflected in much of his visit, is that his aspirations will remain something of a minority voice within its hierarchy.