A conversation stopper at those West End of Glasgow ecumenically based intellectual dinner parties , many of them involving Christians , to which we are not often enough invited, once the dinner wine nonsense has been fully explored and we’re on to the hard stuff, like Chartreuse and Strega , is that inevitably the gloves will come off, and someone will say, ’Well, what about the early Popes then?’, while the hostess ineffectually wonders if anyone wants taxis phoned.
As well our fellow guests might. We are all, of course , indebted to Gibbon for his brilliant description of the antics on Vatican Hill , whatever his motives actually were , consciously or unconsciously, in describing these so brilliantly. Few families involved in the ancestry business actually find the traditional sheep stealers present, but for those who do, we as Catholics know the feeling.
What a shower! We hang grimly on to the bon mot that they are, of course, proof of the fact that the Church must be Looked After , since were it not, it could have hardly survived.
As Scottish Catholics in 2017, of course, we who have borne the burden of Cardinal O’Brien and the paedophiles in the heat of the day are better equipped than most Catholics in 2017 to bite the bullet and struggle on. We must defer however to our co-religionists in Boston, related closely in blood and beliefs to them as many of us are, as they have to suffer coping with reaction to the death of Cardinal Law , whose sole contribution to the movement of the Church to Omega Point was concealing the paedophily of his errant priests and to send them to other parishes to continue their activities. And we write here having had to tolerate personally in a local parish which we used as ours the ministrations of such a priest in the Sacrament of Reconciliation and above all, in the provision of the Eucharist. Although his last published request was to assure us of his prayers . Where, we say, among other things, was Dante when we needed him?
Both Cardinal Law and Cardinal O’Brien , we imagine, will survive in an otherwise unimaginable future, as the kind of footnote which will stop students of Church history, almost certainly largely Chinese , D.V., in their tracks. With O’Brien, the response will be puzzlement as to how he got away with it, interesting but at the moment, irrelevant. But Cardinal Law- and that was his name, although he sounds like a fugitive from the wrong side of the stage in a Mystery Play- was a real person , should the earnest Chinese student wonder how St John Paul II bishops got the way they finished up .
Law by name and by nature, he was particularly interested in the new Catechism , and pinning them –i.e. you and me- down to rules and regulations . That’s when you’ve got them squirming! He was also most interested in sorting out women’s religious orders. They were obviously not only women, but obviously biologically inferior, and a possible occasion of sin by birth.
But above all Cardinal Law was worried about how the revelation that so many of his priests were paedophiles would affect the reputation of the Church. In other words, how it would affect his reputation too, of course.
The idea of the Church ever being wrong about anything, although we’re all quite used to it with, say, usury and slavery, could not be allowed either, presumably in case someone doubted its judgment re some contemporary issue .It’s as if when the Nazis overran the Low Countries the War Office had decided to ban the evacuation at Dunkirk, because of the British Army’s reputation. Or the Titanic hadn’t carried lifeboats at all, because of Cunard White Star’s image.
And when one considers the damage done to innocent children and the devastation done to the lives of all the good priests , and the real damage done to the Church’s credibility by the cover-up , what a disaster he and the others like him have been.
In charity ,he was, of course, trapped. He was trapped by the nonsense of ‘the bishop’s palace’, by being called ‘My lord’ , by the special uniform, by the absolute power granted by Canon Law, by the support given by the-equally trapped Curia and by the intellectual straitjacket provided by all of these. Can we be sure that any of us in the same position would have or could have escaped the trap. We must say, as our brother in Christ, may he rest in peace.
It is no wonder that someone of the calibre of Eamon Duffy should publicly wonder at the speed with which SJPII was canonised, not to mention the efficiency with which the Curia looked after one of its own later.
At least two generations of Catholics have looked at all of this with disgust and withdrawn the hems of their garments . In other words, at least two generations of Catholics have deprived themselves of the Eucharist on a weekly basis, not to mention those deprived of it through the unwillingness of young men to be associated with the Tridentine priesthood.
The solution is obvious. To find another way of providing the Eucharist. Pope Francis has asked his bishops to consider extending ordination to parishioners , the obvious and only solution.
When are we going to start ?
One remembers and can modify the song muttered so effectively by Marlene Dietrich changing it to :’
‘Where have all the bishops gone , long time passing?
When will they ever learn ? When will they ever learn ?’