Catholicus - diarium in tela

Someone told me I was rather hard on Patsy Mc Garry in my post the other day.  For a moment I thought, maybe I was.  that feeling lasted until I read Mc Garry's article today in the Irish Times;  he is still the John Dillinger of religious correspondents.  In this little piece he's attacking the Seal of the Confessional and using a book by Dr Marie Keenan as his way in.  I haven't read the book but I have read other things she's written and heard her on TV.  I suspect Mc Garry has picked his quotations carefully to support his thesis that confession has used by abusive priests to support them in their practice.  He says that only once was an abusive spoken to harshly by a confessor, challenged to reform.  Of course if Mc Garry was writing about contraception and he found a confessor who had spoken harshly to someone confessing he'd be complaining about that too.

He says the priest isn't supposed to be a judge.  Well that's where he's quite wrong.  The Canon Law is crystal clear:  Can. 978 §1 In hearing confessions the priest is to remember that he is at once both judge and healer, and that he is constituted by God as a minister of both divine justice and divine mercy, so that he may contribute to the honor of Gol and the salvation of souls.
       §2 In administering the sacrament, the confessor, as a minister of the Church, is to adhere faithfully to the teaching of the magisterium and to the norms laid down by the competent authority.

Dr Keenan recently addressed the so called Association of Catholic Priests. She had interesting things to say on the Church's child protection structures:

Child protection is becoming increasingly legalistic and bureaucratic in general across many jurisdictions, but in my view the Catholic Church in Ireland wins the prize for taking this to extremes. The Church’s child protection structures are fast becoming unnecessarily bureaucratic, legalistic, centralised and costly institutions that work in parallel to those of the State, duplicating work with questionable results, not only in Ireland but also in the US and the UK.

While many applaud these initiatives, which are a response by the Catholic Church to the public outcry that followed the disclosure of sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, in my view they are built on a flawed logic that is itself at the core of the problem – i.e., that the Catholic Church is set above and set apart! In my view, the Catholic Church does not need its own child protection or child safeguarding centralised super operation; it merely needs to co-operate at local level with the agents of the State, just like other professional groupings, such as teachers, social care professionals, doctors, lawyers and other health and care professionals.

It is also worryingly clear that the Catholic Church’s Safeguarding Office is attempting to impose a ‘top-down’ structure of child protection and child safeguarding on the dioceses and agents of the Catholic Church, in ways that run against acknowledged best practice in child protection. Instead of encouraging local cooperation and multidisciplinary approaches to enhancing the well-being and protection of children, the National Office for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church in Ireland appears intent on imposing a centralist approach in which all dioceses and agents are controlled by the National Office’s Chief Executive and its policies. It is little wonder that parallels between such a centralised form of control and the centralised form of control that was previously exercised by the Church hierarchy and so trenchantly criticised by the laity, have been well drawn.

This situation signals for me, not good child protection practices but a breakdown of right relationship and a breakdown in trust. Not only have priests lost trust in the hierarchy, but it appears to me too that the hierarchy has lost trust in the priests. In what is mirroring the punitive form of civil protection that is taking place in civil society, what David Garland has called the “garrison state”, the Catholic Church is creating its own garrison state within a garrison state in which the only antidote to current fear is the endless extension of control.

I think she has it right.  We've added an extra layer of bureaucracy we don't need.  If you think someone might have committed a crime against a child go tell the police.  What is the point of telling a diocesan or parish delegate?  If he or she goes and tells the police then all you've done is add a delay to the process.  If he or she doesn't, then where does that leave you?  Have you done your duty by telling him or her?