Jesus had no tolerance for adult destruction of childhood faith – so why did the Catholic Church’s leaders hide clerical sex abuse from parents?
At the highest level, and globally, the clerical Catholic church of the 20th century not only failed to protect children from widespread clerical sexual abuse but conspired to conceal this failure from Catholic parents – until it was revealed by the victims themselves.
Not even yet, in 2025 – under an American pope – does the hierarchical church show any determination or sense of obligation to trace this failure to its historical source, or to measure the depth of disillusionment it has caused. A call from Ireland in 2022 for a reckoning on this issue has been ignored – and so has the looming disappearance of Catholic clergy here, as vocations to that priesthood collapse.
Meanwhile state inquiries into church abuse in Ireland have indicted both clerical Catholic silence and the lay passivity that facilitated abuse in Catholic-run institutions – but even yet – despite synodality – the Irish church has had no discussion of those evils. In spite of a strong call in September 2024 by Archbishop Dermot Farrell of Dublin for an end to a ‘culture of denial’, a hopeless policy still prevails of waiting for scandals to run their course, for everyone to forget and for some amnesiac remnant to move on.
This is a policy for extinction – the complete opposite of the New Creation promised by the Christian Gospel. It is the opposite also of the transparency called for by the Synodal process initiated by Pope Francis in 2021. It would surely have been rejected by the church’s founder – whose condemnation of the adult scandalisation of children was more severe than any other.
Jesus the Ultimate Prophet
That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified for calling out mere religious performance, that he never joined the Jewish religious elite of his time, and that he condemned elitism per se, is plain from the Gospel texts that all Catholics hear at Mass. He was squarely therefore in the prophetic tradition of Judaism, and his sacrifice and death were squarely in that pattern also. He is repeatedly identified by others as a prophet (Luke 7:16, John 4:19) and his actions mirror those of Elijah, Jeremiah and Amos, in calling for justice, not empty ritual.
Moreover, Jesus explicitly identified himself with this prophetic tradition, predicting that he would suffer the same fate:
“Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build the sepulchres of the prophets and decorate the tombs of the upright, saying, ‘We would never have joined in shedding the blood of the prophets, had we lived in our ancestors’ day.’ So! Your own evidence tells against you! You are the children of those who murdered the prophets! Very well then, finish off the work that your ancestors began.” (Matt 23:29-32)
For the Franciscan Richard Rohr Jesus is therefore the ultimate prophet who challenges all religious systems from the standpoint of their victims1The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr, 2025.. Jesus’ most dire warning against any adult action that would shatter the faith of a child (Matt 18:6) must surely be interpreted as part of that prophetic critique. Does anyone doubt that this Jesus would have had zero tolerance for clerical abuse of children – as called for by St Peter Damian in 1049 in his letter to Pope Leo IX?
Why did no bishop of the Catholic church – and no pope – ever take a similar stand?
How now, in the wake of what has happened, can Irish Catholics – or Catholics anywhere – be expected to recognise Jesus in a purely ritual and symbolic priesthood, a priesthood that remained mute – that was trained to be mute – when children were being violated? How can they be content with a church calendar, and with services, that never celebrate the prophetic character of Jesus’ sacrifice – that explain his crucifixion solely in terms of propitiation of the Father?
Jesus the Propitiator: A Failed Christology
This surely was the core failure of the Tridentine Catholic church – a Christology that collapsed the Gospel into the story of a dissatisfied God who called his son to repay by his death a debt that we sinners could not. Even the Divine Mercy devotion promoted by Pope John Paul II calls for the same despairing emphasis – as though only fifty repetitive references to Jesus’ ‘sorrowful passion’ – to be repeated forever – will somehow persuade this Father God – at last – to be merciful.
That from the beginning the Father was merciful, that Jesus was instead calling all to follow his own prophetic stance in opposing religious hypocrisy, that he was raised from death, by the Father, for this courage – and that his prophetic witness in challenging injustice – wherever it occurs – is the distinctive call to all – could not be countenanced by the Catholic Church of Christendom – the church that rewarded only compliance and passivity and called all dissent disloyal.
And this, ultimately, was the root cause of the failure of article 37 of Lumen Gentium (1964) – the Vatican II constitution on the church. This clearly pointed to the emergence of church structures in which concerns could have been raised about any matter that threatened the spiritual health and witness of the people of God. Yet only passive compliance with hierarchical decree could be tolerated, even after Vatican II – so that church of compliance was doomed to disgrace, despite the council.
Synodality too will be doomed if it does not re-centre itself on Jesus the Prophet, and reconfigure the church accordingly – with structures that allow for prophetic challenge to any abuse of ecclesial power. An annual feast day for Christ the Prophet, with a papal encyclical that does justice to this need, could signal such a reckoning – but when will we get a pope – and a hierarchy – that sees this?
[To read Brian McLaren of the Centre for Action and Contemplation on the importance of Jesus the Prophet click here.]Notes
- The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr, 2025.
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