by Dick Edelstein
The visit by Pope Francis to Ireland in 2018 as part of the World Meeting of Families was important since it was the first one since the historic visit by Pope John Paul II in 1979, an event that drew around one and a quarter million people to a mass in Dublin’s Phoenix Park, the biggest crowd ever seen in the country, amounting to almost one-third of the population. Since then, religious feeling in Ireland had been on the wane, along with the Church’s authority over those who considered themselves Catholics, which was in a near-fatal slump. The Church was facing an uncertain future with the number of new seminarians dropping to record lows for several years.
Still, that visit in 2018 had generated certain expectations. First, a turnout of half a million people was expected in Phoenix Park, a figure that proved to be overestimated by around 400 percent. The actual turnout—some 130,000 people—was much smaller. However, that was nothing compared to the other expectation. On account of widespread cases of sexual molestation by clergy and a generalized public dissatisfaction over the failure of the church to recognise its history of abuse and make suitable reparations to the victims, many Irish people were expecting Pope Francis, given his reputation as a liberal, to issue a detailed and lengthy apology. In recent decades, public outrage about sexual abuse by clergy had been a worldwide occurrence, but the issue had special significance in Ireland, where the moral tone of the entire country since independence had been set by the Catholic church, despite its longstanding record of abuse.
Other factors affected Irish people’s expectations of a full apology from the Pope. One of these was the Magdalene laundries scandal. Throughout much of the twentieth century, thousands of Irish women had been incarcerated in Magdalene institutions, most of which were run by Catholic religious orders. The women were forced to work without pay or benefits. Despite the outrageous violation of the women’s human rights, the Irish government colluded with their detention and was complicit in their treatment. In 2011, a group called Justice for Magdalenes made a submission to the U.N. Committee Against Torture, arguing that the Irish government’s failure to deal with the abuse amounted to continuing degrading treatment in violation of the Convention Against Torture and that the state had failed to promptly investigate “a more than 70-year system of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of women and girls in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries”.
The story of the Magdalene Laundries was still reverberating in the public consciousness when in March 2017 Ireland was shocked by the discovery that, between 1925 and 1961, the bodies of 796 babies and young children had been interred in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, County Galway, many in a septic tank. Catherine Corless, the local historian who exposed the scandal, complained to Irish legislators that nothing had been done to exhume the bodies after her research came to light despite expressions of “shock and horror” from the Government and the President. Instead, the site had been returned to its original condition. As with the Magdalene scandal, the authorities initially showed unimaginable insensitivity and cruelty towards affected families.
Thus, when Pope Francis came to visit in August 2018, Irish people expected a full and sincere apology because of his reputation for sympathy towards a number of liberal causes, his commitment to the protection of vulnerable people, and on account of a series of special circumstances in Ireland. But surprisingly, no sufficiently firm apology was forthcoming. His comments were characterised in the press as “too little too late”. In addition, the low turnout for the papal Mass in Phoenix Park indicated a sea change in the Irish body politic, a trend clearly revealed just a few months earlier, on 25 May, when the campaign to repeal the Eighth Amendment to the Irish constitution (the 1983 anti-abortion amendment) succeeded by a surprising 66.4%—a landslide victory.
Once Pope Francis arrived in Ireland, he quickly became aware of the degree of discontent its citizens were harbouring through both personal conversations and public remarks made by officials, including Leo Varadker, the Irish Taoiseach or head of state. As a result, he made an unscheduled request for forgiveness in the form of a penitential prayer during the closing Mass in Phoenix Park.
Here is what he said:
“We ask forgiveness for the abuses in Ireland, abuses of power, of conscience, and sexual abuses perpetrated by members with roles of responsibility in the church.
In a special way, we ask pardon for all the abuses committed in various types of institutions run by males or female religious and by other members of the church, and we ask for forgiveness for those cases of manual work that so many young women and men were subjected to. We ask for forgiveness.
We ask forgiveness for the times that, as a church, we did not show the survivors of whatever kind of abuse the compassion and the seeking of justice and truth through concrete actions.
We ask for forgiveness for some of the church hierarchy who did not take charge of these situations and kept quiet.
We ask for forgiveness for all those times in which many single mothers were told that to seek their children who had been separated from them—and the same being said to daughters and sons themselves—that this was a mortal sin. This is not a mortal sin. We ask for forgiveness.”
What the Irish people wanted, however, was more than a plea for forgiveness. They wanted to know what concrete steps the church was taking to remedy the situation to ensure that it would never occur again. They wanted to know precisely to what high levels in the church’s hierarchy the cover-up extended—that is, who, what and when, with times and dates included. And they wanted to hear in detail what the church intended to do to vindicate, reconcile and compensate the victims of abuse. Alas, that explanation was not forthcoming.
At this point, readers will surely want to know why Pope Francis failed to deliver the sort of full and frank apology that the Irish nation—and the Catholics, in particular—were waiting for. A good answer to this question is probably somewhere to be found, but I don’t have it. The Catholic church can be as hermetic as a clam when it wants to be, which is most of the time, and I haven’t managed to find any documentary evidence that would clarify what the church leaders had in mind at that time, but a few possible explanations occur to me.
- In a lengthy CNN interview with journalist Christiane Amanpour broadcast just a few days ago, the former Irish President Mary McAleese, a practising catholic, declared that on account of his genuine liberal disposition Pope Francis always “talked a good story”, but unfortunately did not really change anything fundamental in Church teaching or dogma, with the notable exception of capital punishment. For example, he opened up the question of women becoming deacons, but at the same time he reminded the faithful that they were still prohibited from publicly disagreeing with church dogma on women priests.
- The whole issue of clerical abuse was, at that time, a hornet’s nest in the Vatican and everyone was violently stirred up about the issue. Just as an example, it bothered some cardinals that the African cardinals would not admit that there had ever been any abuse in Africa. Furthermore, any comments the Pope might have made could have had legal implications in ongoing law suits in several countries.
- The Pope may have been under pressure from conservative sectors of the church with power and influence, who had a different agenda regarding the church’s handling of the abuse scandal and had enough power to keep the Pope from publicly opening this giant can of worms.
I remember the papal visit well because I was in Dublin at the time, although my interest in it was desultory. Born and raised as a Catholic, I still bore a few grudges stemming from the six years I spent in the Catholic educational system, but by that time in my life (I was about 70) my lingering resentment had pretty much coalesced into bland equanimity
It seems that Pope Francis will be regarded in the future as an outlier among popes, a man who was truly concerned with the plight of the most powerless and abused people around the world, someone who had been profoundly affected by the powerful liberation theology movement in Latin America, but who, as a pope, was more of a politician than a real shit-stirrer. Only time will tell how his legacy will be perceived.