Greg Daly
There is reason to speculate on how well prepared the Pope was for his Irish trip, writes Greg Daly
“It is not enough to turn the page. Life must be given anew.” This quote from Pope Francis headlined the La Civiltà Cattolica account last week of the August 25 meeting between the Pope and a group of 63 Irish Jesuits, but though there’s much to applaud in the account it’s hard not to come away from reading it with a worrying suspicion that the Holy Father had not been especially well briefed ahead of his trip to Ireland.
Apologising for the lateness of his meeting with the Jesuits, the Pontiff explained that he had a meeting with eight survivors of sexual and institutional abuse.
“I didn’t know that in Ireland there were also cases where unmarried women had their children taken away from them,” he said. “Hearing this particularly touched my heart. Today the minister for children and young people spoke to me about this issue, and then sent me a memorandum. I want to ask you a special help: help the Church in Ireland to put an end to this.”
His comments on putting an end to it did not simply mean “stop doing this”, of course, instead being a call for the clergy to do what they can to do whatever is necessary to heal wounds and give life back to people.
But what on earth does it mean to say that he did not know about Mother and Baby homes, or how they operated? Certainly, several of those who spoke with him ahead of his meetings with the Jesuits have testified to his astonishment on hearing both about the homes and about Magdalene Laundries.
Translator
Paul Redmond, who was born in a Mother and Baby home, told RTÉ the Pope had “literally had no idea” what a Magdalene laundry was. “It ended up with me giving him a three- or four-minute crash course through his translator as to the institutions of Ireland,” he said, with Bernadette Fahy also saying the Pope had “appeared to know nothing” about the laundries or about industrial schools.
Speaking to the Irish Independent, Marie Collins said the Pontiff had seemed confused about the different institutions. “He certainly was quite shocked and he asked when he didn’t understand. He wanted to know the difference between the Magdalene Laundries and the Mother and Baby Homes,” she said, adding: “He wasn’t trying to deny it in any way, he actually wanted to know more.”
That the Pope should have been so ignorant on these issues beggars belief, some have said, pointing to how in February 2014 he briefly met with Philomena Lee, whose search for the son from whom she was separated while in a Roscrea Mother and Baby home in the 1950s inspired the Oscar-nominated film Philomena.
This, at least, seems a slightly unfair criticism: although Mrs Lee attended Mass in St Peter’s Square, her encounter with the Pope lasted just seconds, and it’s not clear how much he understood from what he was told in those seconds by Steve Coogan, who co-wrote and co-produced the film, as well as starring in it.
A more important problem concerns how just weeks before the papal visit there were still discussions about whether Pope Francis could visit the site of the Magdalene Laundry on Dublin’s Sean McDermott Street. One would hope that as these ideas were being passed around between Dublin and Rome that somebody might have explained to Pope Francis what the laundries were, how their history is contested, how they related to and differed from Mother and Baby homes, and why all of this matters.
One way or another, shock around being told of these things certainly seems to have moulded the Pope’s comments over the course of his visit, which speech after speech being adjusted to incorporate things he had seemingly just heard about, the first of these being his reference in Dublin Castle to his encounter with Minister Katharine Zappone at Áras an Uachtaráin earlier that day.
“With regard to the reality of the most vulnerable, I cannot fail to acknowledge the grave scandal caused in Ireland by the abuse of young people by members of the Church charged with responsibility for their protection and education,” he said, continuing, “The words spoken to me by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs still resonate in my heart; I thank her for those words.”
The first question put to the Pontiff on the flight back to Rome concerned what exactly Minister Zappone had said, with the Pope saying: “She told me, and she was brief, ‘Holy Father, we found mass graves of children, buried children, we’re investigating… and the Church has something to do with this.’”
Granted, the term ‘mass graves’ was absent from the minister’s own account of the meeting, and leaving aside how members of the Tuam Home Survivors’ Network has dismissed the minister’s actions as a publicity stunt, one thing seems clear: the Pope was wrongfooted by the encounter, and left grappling from that point on with immensely serious matters about which he seems to have known nothing.
More broadly, other slightly odd notes were struck later in the Pope’s meeting with the Jesuits, when he gave advice on Confession and commented on excessive strictness.
“Who among us does not know an authoritarian bishop?” he asked. “Forever in the Church there have been authoritarian bishops and religious superiors. And authoritarianism is clericalism.
“Sometimes the sending in mission decisively and with authority is confused with authoritarianism. Instead they are two different things. We need to defeat authoritarianism and rediscover the obedience of the sending in mission.”
He would make a similar point when speaking to Ireland’s bishops the next day, when he said: “Do not repeat the attitudes of aloofness and clericalism that at times in your history have given the real image of an authoritarian, harsh and autocratic Church.”
Advising bishops against being aloof might be good perennial advice, but there are few fair or informed observers who believe authoritarianism or aloofness are vices that especially plague the Church in Ireland today. Indeed, it has been some decades since that would have been a reasonable criticism, just as it has been some decades since Irish priests would have needed to be reminded that Confession should be “an encounter with Jesus Christ, not a torture room or a psychiatrist’s couch”.
There’s no doubting the wisdom of what the Pope had and has to say on this topic, but while his advice on this subject might have been a boon to the Irish Church of 40 or 50 years ago, it hardly seems something today’s priests desperately need to hear.
With seemingly misplaced priorities, and with an apparent ignorance about the various hot-button aspects of the institutional abuse debates, it is hard to avoid wondering how exactly the Pope was prepared for his visit and what he was told by Ireland’s bishops, by the Vatican’s Secretariate of State, and by Irish prelates in Rome.