(St. Edmund’s Church, England where Deacon Sean Murphy Serves)
By Deacon Sean Murphy
Several decades ago I was at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper in Westminster Cathedral. Shortly before he was due to remove his chasuble, don an apron and get down on his knees to wash the feet of twelve old men, the Cardinal Archbishop got up to preach. He was much-loved and well-known for his kindness and accessibility, so I was taken aback when he spoke of what was about to happen as a ‘great act of theatre’ in which he would be ‘re-enacting’ what Our Lord had done at the Last Supper. The sanctuary of the Cathedral was a magnificent space, of course, and the dazzling uniforms of the twelve Chelsea Pensioners who were about to have their feet washed certainly added to the visual impact. But, for all the splendour of the setting, what the Cardinal was about to do was surely not to give a performance: it was, rather, or at least, it should have been, a humble, personal act of self-abasement, to remind us, but especially himself, that he had been ordained for service of those under his pastoral care. His words suggested to me that the Cardinal saw it otherwise and there hung about him a sense that he remained, first and foremost, a Prince of the Church: he and his kind were in charge, bestowing service on The Rest of You.
That top-down, clergy-know-best attitude leads inevitably to the evil of clericalism. It is a small step from clericalism to the monstrous concept that nothing should be allowed to undermine the Good Name of the Church, because, to put it bluntly, in a clergy-dominated Church the Good Name of the Church really means the Good Name of the Clergy. That is how clerical sexual abuse and cover-up arose, flourished, even, and with it the need, above all, to silence by every means available, the victims whose suffering, were it known, would bring the Good Name of the Church crashing down. Anyone who has heard the testimony of victims of abuse and of the families and supporters who tried desperately to make their voices heard would curl up in pain and horror, not just to hear what they underwent at the hands of their abusers, but, all too often, at the hands of Church interrogators who forced them, over and over again, in an effort to break them, to describe in detail what had been done to them. But then, why would the Church that Knows Best give an ear to anybody whose words might undermine its own Good Name?
In recent years, thank God, there has been a degree of progress, albeit uneven, but let us not think that we can congratulate ourselves on what little has been achieved. Even in the most enlightened of dioceses, the ones that seek to put victims and their voices to the fore, regardless of the potential financial and reputational cost (yes, that would still appear to be an issue in some jurisdictions) it is reckoned that a large majority of victims have not yet been able to come forward to seek help. This is hardly surprising given the way in which the Church had consistently let them down by not protecting them and then by not letting them speak. What victims who do come forward tell their champions is not so much that they want revenge on the perpetrators, and they certainly don’t usually talk about ‘compensation’: what they want is just to be heard, and to be heard on their own terms, by a Church that will listen.
Yes, we need to listen. It is important to remember that victims’ trust in the Church has been, at best, eroded and, more commonly, destroyed; so however well-intentioned a penitent Church and its sympathetic members might be, what victims don’t need is to be told what a contrite Church can do for them. It is the other way round: the victims need to tell us what, if anything, we can do for them. When victims are told that, as believers in God’s healing love, we like to pray for them as ‘Survivors’ of sexual abuse, rather than as ‘Victims’, we should remember that, even as the abuser all but destroyed their lives, he may well have told his victim, ‘God really loves you.’ No, it is for victims to decide whether they see themselves as victims or as survivors, not for us. And when a victim cannot bear to be touched, it is not for us to think that our Christian calling empowers us to offer the victim a little hug of God-inspired sympathy, because, for a victim even a simple hug can trigger a traumatic reaction.
Nothing we can do or say as a Church can cancel out the appalling crimes that have been committed against children and vulnerable people by clergy, religious and other Church workers. Nor can we can undo the trauma and damage which so many victims have to live with, day in, day out, year in, year out. Nor can we bring back those who died or took their own lives as a result of what they suffered: our collective hands as a Church are too deeply stained to be able to make much of a difference to the vast majority of victims.
And yet there is one thing the Church can do, and that is to do what victims ask of us: to let them speak, and to listen to whatever they might want to tell us. When we listen to somebody, we give them their voice, and that is to acknowledge their humanity. This may seem a small thing, until we remember that the victim’s humanity is what their abuser denied them, and continued to deny them, sometimes, year after year; it is a humanity that was stifled by a Church that wished that victims would shut up or go away and that often tried its utmost to make them do just that. So let’s make a start by just listening to those who suffered and who continue to suffer.
In my next newsletter article I want to write about a diocese in Canada that has been doing just that: they have listened to victims, they have given them a voice, and while the diocese makes no great claims for itself, it has been making significant strides in championing the cause of victims and in doing everything it can to bring about the sort of changes necessary at all levels to minimise the risk of clerical sexual abuse in the future.
