What's the Latin for "too little, too late"?

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz, August 23.)

It can’t be easy being Catholic right now. Barely a week passes without fresh revelations of sexually predatory behaviour by priests and squalid attempts by their superiors to cover up their crimes.

Recent examples include the exposure of historic abuse by monks at two leading English Benedictine schools and a grand jury report detailing accusations, some of them truly grotesque, against 300 priests in Pennsylvania.

And the finger of blame points ever higher. An American cardinal, Theodore McCarrick, was recently removed from office following allegations involving boys as young as 11. A sickening photo from 1974 showed a gloating McCarrick, then a priest, in swimming togs with his arm around the bare waist of one of his alleged teenage victims.

Another prince of the church, the Australian cardinal George Pell, has been ordered to stand trial over historical claims of abuse. Pell’s countryman Philip Wilson, the archbishop of Adelaide, resigned after being convicted of protecting a paedophile priest in the 1970s.

In Chile, three bishops quit under a similar cloud. Thirty-one others offered their resignations, indicating some degree of culpability. Only months earlier, Pope Francis had dismissed accusations against one of the offending bishops as slanderous.

The pope has now issued a letter apologising to all Catholics. I wonder what the Latin translation is for “too little, too late”.

Here in New Zealand, the Church continues to shudder at a steady stream of sordid disclosures.

Two recent examples: the late Father Michael Shirres of Auckland, a theologian and authority on Maori spirituality, who admitted abusing a young girl – although it’s suspected there were many others – and was quietly placed on a sex offenders programme; and Fr Magnus Murray of Dunedin, who remained a priest for nearly two decades after his offending against boys was revealed to his bishop. He eventually admitted 10 charges and was jailed in 2003.

Records show that Murray was shifted from parish to parish while his past was kept secret – the so-called geographical solution.

The scale and impunity of offending by priests beggars belief. A 2012 American documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, chronicled in chilling detail the brazen, systematic abuse of vulnerable boys and young men and the ease with which the perpetrators – playing on their standing in communities that were conditioned to revere priests – were able to evade accountability for their monstrous acts.

All Catholics should watch Mea Maxima Culpa, as painful as it might be.

The offenders were typically charismatic and confident – so confident that they would even abuse boys during the rite of confession. The Church hierarchy was principally concerned with protecting itself, quietly paying off complainants and binding them to declarations of confidentiality.

How far up the hierarchy did the cover-up extend? “The higher you go, the more they know,” said a former Benedictine monk who now counsels victims of clerical abuse. 

Courageous whistle-blowers within the Church have been ostracised as troublemakers – even traitors. 

All these themes are explored in the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally’s book Crimes of the Father. It’s a rather plodding novel but Keneally, who once trained for the priesthood, accurately depicts what you might call the “atmospherics” of the Church – the calcified rituals, the obeisance to hierarchical authority and the resistance to outside scrutiny.

It goes without saying that preying on the young and vulnerable, and cynically taking advantage of parents’ reluctance to believe that priests could do anything wrong, is the antithesis of what the Church is supposed to stand for.

I say this as someone who grew up immersed in Catholicism and remains what Keneally calls a “cultural Catholic” – someone who, like him, rejects Catholic dogma but has absorbed Catholic values and can empathise with those who have stayed loyal to the Church.

I feel sorry for the many blameless and dedicated Catholic clergy who must live with the taint of suspicion, and for the many devout and genuinely holy Catholics who have remained staunch despite being repeatedly failed (betrayed might be a more accurate word) by their leaders. Obviously, they see beyond “the cold and largely self-interested corporation” – Kenneally’s term for the Church – to something much nobler.

There seems to be two Churches. One is rotten and diseased while the other remains true to the faith.

The Catholic Church as an institution needs its doors thrown wide open, metaphorically speaking, so that a cleansing wind can blow through. Perhaps it needs another Martin Luther to purge it of its impurities, or a bloodless coup by lay people.

A good start would be to allow priests to marry, which might go some way toward destroying the Church’s appeal to sexually dysfunctional men seeking a shelter in which to safely pursue their warped predilections.

Another would be to give equal status to women, who have a proud history in the Catholic Church of standing up to the vain, controlling males who have made such an ungodly mess of running the show.