Scandals could undermine the church's foundations

The Irish Times
Monday, December 14, 2009
THEO DORGAN

[...]
Ordinary Catholics, right now, need nothing less from powerful individuals in their church than a clear demonstration of shared faith and values. What they are getting is the unlovely spectacle of men clinging to power when the wiser (and, not incidentally, morally better) course would be a renunciation of worldly vanity, the voluntary relinquishing of power. It is open to any bishop, for instance, to whom the merest whiff of scandal clings like unholy incense, to make a virtue of stepping aside, to seize this opportunity of demonstrating that charity, humility, justice and compassion are the animating forces in their lives as well as the cornerstones of a shared faith.

Why has this not already happened? I strongly suspect it is because both the aware, like Martin, and the unaware, like Murray of Limerick, are fundamentally agreed that the authority of the church, the integrity of the competent organs, must be maintained. They differ, in political terms, only on how this is to be done.

I remind myself that even while Gorbachev was busy about perestroika
and glasnost, mainstream ideologues in the politburo and in the party were confidently grooming the next generation of traditional Soviet apparatchiks. What all had in common, of course, was a wish to see the power of the party perpetuated, and this in the end would provide the reason why they perished together, conservatives and reformers alike.
...
It took time, of course, but once the lie is exposed, downfall, however indefinitely delayed, is both sure and certain.

I wonder at how blind the powerful are, how contemptuous of, how utterly divorced from, those whom they presume to rule.

Neither the Vatican nor the Kremlin seem to have pondered the ironic hidden truth in Lenin’s proposition on behalf of the party: “He who is not with us is against us.” When this is spoken by the powerless, when this becomes the agreed belief of the powerless, empires fall.


As with Catholicism, so with communism. One might have imagined that, with doctrine and faith clarified and established, only the simplest of church or state structures would have been needed to maintain the teachings and integrity of the faith.
...
It seems very likely that something has changed forever in our Republic. The skeletal presence of the Catholic Church in our institutions and in our mores has begun to wither away, smoke in a gale, dust in the wind; there is a danger that with it will go the foundational ideals of justice, charity, compassion and mercy. We can already see the damage done in our country’s short-lived flirtation with mammon. We
have seen what happened when the post-Gorbachev USSR turned to gangster capitalism. We would do well to begin thinking clearly, and very soon, about what we will choose for the moral foundations of a post-Catholic Ireland.

Theo Dorgan is a poet, writer and broadcaster