The Roots of Deference and Abuse
"At every turn, Irish people kept their mouths shut out of deference to State, system, church and community. When they should have been unified in fury and outrage they were instead silenced, afraid to even whisper a criticism against the powerful." Frances Fitzgerald, Ireland's Minister for Children, as reported in the Irish Times, 26th Sep, 2011.
The Amnesty International report on the abuse of children in institutions run by the Irish Catholic Church in the last century will probably itself come in for criticism, but so far, despite a strong recommendation by Bishop Noel Treanor of Down and Connor in May 2009, there has been no sign of a church-sponsored investigation of that abuse. Given the scale of the disaster, this is a lamentable failure to add to all of the others, and raises the question 'why?'
Minister Frances Fitzgerald's reiteration of a theme that was also prominent in the Ryan report - the culture of deference that led to self-censorship by so many Irish people - raises again the question of the roots of this deference. There is very strong reason to believe that deference is inculcated in Catholics by the absence of downward structures of accountability in the church.
Deference is essentially a tendency to cringe in the face of authority. It is born of fear - in this case the fear of questioning those who exercise power. Structurally the Catholic church provides no regular opportunity for its lay people to question the stewardship of its leaders. This is a clear statement that they have no right or authority to do so. Clearly a legacy of a long historical era in which bishops belonged to a social elite, this state of affairs is a glaring anachronism, but no reigning Catholic bishop has dared to say so.
It is also plainly a defiance of the Gospels. Catholic bishops cannot claim to be 'servants of the servants of God' if they ignore the copious evidence in scripture that servants are always being called to account for their stewardship.
Meanwhile the problem of holding negligent bishops to account has not been resolved, and the collapsing authority and prestige of the church is closely linked to this.
It is time for all of those who are concerned by this state of affairs to point straight at the strongest root of Catholic deference: its elitist and unaccountable organisational structure. If the pending report of the Vatican visitation to Ireland fails to do that, it too will lack credibility.
Meanwhile the failure of the Irish Catholic hierarchy to investigate the ecclesiastical causes of the outrages recorded in the Ryan report suggests strongly that they are afraid of what such an inquiry would reveal, and this is another serious source of Irish Catholic demoralisation.