A curate's egg from the Irish Catholic...

The editorial in the Irish Catholic is somewhat of a mixed bag this week - Garry O'Sullivan does make a good point about the usefulness of a more visible act of penance on behalf of the Irish hierarchy.
However, his rather unfocussed anger draws in a whole range of other issues which muddy the waters significantly and which generate a lot of unnecessary heat.
I'm particularly disappointed by his handling of the Bishops' recent pastoral letter on Friday penances (PDF). 
He complains:

Yet the leaflet makes no mention of why Pope Benedict called for penance. No mention of abuse. Just silence on the anniversary of the Murphy Report from the collective group. Remember this moment well because this is the moment that the institutional Church in Ireland picked itself up, dusted itself off and went back to business as usual.
Reading the leaflet, the language is the language of a Church that has long passed. There is no life, no Christ, no Good News in the language used, it's all penance and no explanation why we should be so penitential? What exactly are Christ's faithful in Ireland doing penance for? For the sins of paedophiles? For the bishops who covered up? For the remaining bishops? Where are they today? Certainly not out there leading by example but ducking and diving as usual.

Garry misses the point here - and I don't think that he's understood the Pope's letter properly. It's quite clear from the Holy Father's letter that it's not a question of doing penance specifically for the sins of paedophiles or bishops. What the Pope explicitly asked for was to offer our penances for the following intention: "to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland." What Garry fails to appreciate is that the Friday penance is something which should have been part of our life as Catholics long before the Pope's letter to us - it should be part of normal Catholic life and is part of the Church's discipline (see Canons 1249-1253). I suspect that most Irish Catholics were aware that abstaining from meat on Fridays was no longer strictly obligatory - but I doubt that more that one in fifty were aware that they should have been doing some form of penance on Fridays - either the traditional abstaining from meat or substituting another penance in its place.


I really fail to understand what Garry O'Sullivan means by the leaflet being written in "the language of a Church that has long passed" or that "[t]here is no life, no Christ, no Good News in the language used." The letter explains:

Penance is an essential part of the lives of all Christ’s faithful. It arises from the Lord’s call to conversion and repentance.
We do penance in memory of the passion and death of
the Lord,
* as a sharing in Christ’s suffering,
* as an expression of inner conversion,
* as a form of reparation for sin.

What's so objectionable about that? Christ's public ministry is preceded by the great figure of John the Baptist whose great call is to repentance and conversion. Christ's first public act is - although He Himself was sinless - was to submit to the penitential Baptism of John.
Penance (and particularly fasting) as a means of uniting ourselves to Christ's suffering, as an act of remembrance of Christ's sacrifice, as an act of reparation and as a motivator and expression of interior renewal is central to the Christian tradition. Maybe making a sacrifice for Christ and making some feeble gesture aimed at union with Christ crucified is hardly something we can set aside because it doesn't measure up to some kind of pie-in-the-sky, happy-clappy idea of what the journey of faith is about. A more sober, realistic assessment of the human condition rooted in the wisdom of the great spiritual writers will see the absolute necessity of penance both as a discipline of the Church and as something that the ordinary Christian would eagerly embrace as being part of the fabric of Christian life.

I fail to see how - post-Murphy - the Irish Church can aim for renewal without a recognition for the need for penance as part of the ordinary Christian life. Having come face to face with the sins and weaknesses of abusers, those who enabled abuse, those cover-up abuse and those who lacked the courage to speak out, we should realise more that ever that a Gospel of optimism and shiny-lights is insufficent. Our Friday penance should be a reminder to us of our weakness, a reminder of our need to cling to Christ-crucified, a reminder to us to remain spiritually alert, a reminder to us that we should voluntarily seek solidarity with those who suffer and a reminder to us of our humble dependence on the Lord. It is also a reminder to us that the vigour and the renewal of the Church is not unrelated to the holiness and asceticism of her members. The call for a more humble Church makes little sense if Catholics are too stiff-necked to be penitential. 

I'm also puzzled by the following paragraph in the editorial -

We've seen it recently - when can someone with Aids use a condom? The debate is like the supposed theological debate of the Middle Ages - ''How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?'' The mother of a priest who was in the thick of the resignations and general chaos in the Irish Church post-Murphy Report made a fascinating point to me recently. ''How could a Church'', she asked, ''which was so interested in controlling condoms and making sure everyone behaved in the bedroom as they the Church said was the proper way to behave, could then turn around and give a free pass to those who were molesting children?''

At best, it strikes me as glib. Why bring in the whole debate about the Pope's remarks about condoms? That's hardly the fault of the Irish Church or the Irish Bishops. The Good News of the Church's teaching about sexuality is implicitly trivialised... and given the fact that the debate involves literally involves matters of (physical and spiritual) life and death, I don't think it should be cheaply used to take a potshot at the Bishops.

In fairness to Garry, it's important that he's raising his voice at this time. It would be interesting to hear an episcopal response to what he had to say. It's debatable whether the 1st anniversary of the Murphy Report is the appropriate time for the Irish hierarchy as a whole to make a statement. Perhaps there's more happening at a local level, more things happening quietly than this editorial would suggest. However, it's so unfortunate that the some of the main points of this editorial seem, in my estimation, at least, to miss the mark.