After the Ryan and Murphy Reports: A Roundtable on the Irish Catholic Church

In 2009, the Irish government issued two official reports concerning the Catholic church and documented instances of physical and sexual abuses. The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse—generally known as the Ryan Report, after its chair Justice Seán Ryan—released its findings on May 20. That report, conducted over a ten-year period, examined abuses in some sixty reformatory and industrial schools from 1936 forward. The so-called Murphy Report—the findings of the Commission of Investigation, Dublin Archdiocese, chaired by Judge Yvonne Murphy—was released on November 26. It investigated the manner in which representatives of the Catholic church in the archdiocese of Dublin dealt with allegations of sexual abuses during the period 1975 to 2004.

Few, if any, governmental reports have occasioned so much or such heated discussion in Ireland as have these two documents. The commissions' findings have been extensively reported in the popular media, in church circles, and increasingly, in the scholarly conversation of Irish Studies. In this issue, New Hibernia Review continues that discussion. The four scholars whose remarks appear below conducted their "conversation" by e-mail in January and February 2010.

The Editors

ANDREW AUGE: While similar abuse scandals have afflicted the Catholic church in the United States and, indeed, throughout the world, the situation in Ireland is especially severe. Are there features distinctive to the church in Ireland that have exacerbated the crisis there?

LOUISE FULLER: Yes, there are. The Catholic church in Ireland until very recent times occupied a dominant position in Irish life: powerful, authoritarian, and highly prescriptive in its approach to the laity. In its everyday teaching, a strong emphasis was placed on sin; there was little consideration of what might be termed the gray areas. The result was a legalistic attitude toward transgressions.

JOHN LITTLETON: In Ireland, as distinct from other countries, Catholic identity was perceived as being synonymous with national identity. To be Irish was to be Catholic and vice versa. Catholicism was the majority religious tradition in the country. Unlike other English-speaking countries, in Ireland at the height of the Catholic church's dominance, a disproportionate number of men and women sought and gained admission to seminaries and religious orders.

FULLER: It was a very clerical church. On the one hand there was a certain closeness between clergy and laity, arising out of the historical and political background, but what characterized the relationship most was distance and respect. Clergy were on a pedestal and bishops were even more remote figures. The importance of attendance at Mass and devotional practice was impressed on the laity, and teaching on morality was a matter of adherence to rules laid down in catechetical teaching in school and elaborated in sermons, pastoral letters, and church missions. Catechetical teaching did not encourage critique. Aside from members of the intelligentsia and of the artistic community, a critical culture did not prevail. Indeed, political leaders schooled in this atmosphere did not see their way to challenging the church even in matters that rightly concerned them.

Above all, the Irish church's approach to its teaching on morality was negative. There was an overarching emphasis on sin and punishment. The fear, and the preoccupation with the dangers of hell fire and eternal damnation—which in the context of our own time might seem almost outlandish—was very real. For generations of Catholics there was a great emphasis on and preoccupation with "sins of the flesh." Common expressions at the time, like "occasions of sin" and "impure thoughts," capture the mentalité and would have resonance for Catholics raised in the context of pre-1960s Catholic culture. And many of them experienced harshness, as opposed to compassion from church figures, if they failed to live up to the high standards laid down for them.

But—and this brings me to the nub of the question—while the theory was that we are all "only" human and therefore subject to human frailties, when it came to church figures, they somehow or other, had set the bar so high for their followers...