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.

Redoubtable nuns and men who get in the way

(First published in the Nelson Mail and Manawatu Standard, December 4.)

When I was a boy growing up in a small Hawke’s Bay town, every household would receive a free weekly guide to the films showing at the local picture theatre.

There was a mini-review of each film and it became a standing joke in our family that they were almost invariably described as “heart-warming”.

As a result, I’ve never been able to use the term “heart-warming” without a slightly derisive sneer. But a couple of days ago I watched a film that really was heart-warming, in the sense that you left the theatre feeling better about life and your fellow human beings than you might have been when you walked in.

Gardening with Soul is a feature-length documentary about Sister Loyola Galvin, who looks after the gardens at the Home of Compassion in the Wellington suburb of Island Bay – surely a challenging environment for even the greenest of fingers, given that the soil is not naturally fertile (Sr Loyola’s garden survives only with copious applications of home-made compost) and the climate often punishing.

Film maker Jess Feast spent a year observing Sister Loyola and clearly formed a close and mutually affectionate bond with her. It’s a simple film, beautifully shot and recorded. Every frame is impeccably composed, yet there’s nothing arty or pretentious about it. Like the character at its centre, it’s a no-nonsense piece of work.

Sister Loyola joined the Catholic order known as the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion in her mid-20s, after the man she expected to marry went away to the Second World War and never came back. It can’t have been an easy decision; her father, a Taranaki farmer to whom she was very devoted, was firmly set against her entering the convent and took years to come around. 

Now 90, Sister Loyola is slowed by age but mentally as sharp as a new pin, with bright, bird-like eyes. She radiates wisdom and practical, common-sense spirituality. Compassion, too, as you might expect, given the name of the order she joined.  She says – and I hope I’m quoting her more or less accurately – that it’s possible to see God in everyone, even the most unlikely people, if you look hard enough. If you could bottle that attitude, you’d call it Essence of Christianity.

She’s also quite frank, and jokes that she’s safely past the age when she risked being fired for speaking out of turn. She doesn’t hesitate to say what she thinks, for example, about the scandal of sexual abuse by Catholic priests.

I have encountered nuns like Sr Loyola before. The Catholic Church, which I grew up in, has a tradition of strong – you might even say stroppy – women. There’s no better example than Mother Suzanne Aubert, the doughty Frenchwoman who founded the order to which Sr Loyola belongs.

Arriving in New Zealand in 1860, Aubert decided she hadn’t come halfway around the world to teach French and embroidery to the daughters of wealthy Aucklanders. Instead, she devoted herself to Maori and later to the care of the orphaned, the unwanted, the destitute and the disabled.

In many cases, formidable women such as Aubert had to overcome obstacles placed in their path by the male hierarchy of the Church. You get the feeling that the nuns had a very clear idea of what needed to be done and their male superiors often just got in the way. (For example, nuns working in the backblocks were told they should ride their horses side-saddle, in the interests of decorum – an instruction they sensibly ignored.)

There’s a moment in Gardening with Soul when Sister Loyola, reflecting on the Catholic hierarchy, talks about the nature of power. She doesn’t develop the idea but I wonder whether she was gently suggesting that men, and more specifically the male fondness for power, are problems for the Catholic Church.

If that’s indeed what she was talking about, it’s not just Catholicism that has a problem with authoritarian male hierarchies.

I believe that most organised religion is largely about the exercise of power and control, and these are usually – if not exclusively – male preoccupations.

This is certainly true of faiths that are organised hierarchically, whether it’s Catholicism, Judaism, Islam or Mormonism. In all such religions, power is exercised by men – a striking anachronism in the modern Western world, where women have otherwise rejected the notion of male control.

Only days ago I read that an Israeli woman had been ordered by a religious court to have her son circumcised, against her will, or face fines of nearly $200 a day for every day the procedure was not carried out.

It astonished me to learn that in Israel, which otherwise gives the impression of being a modern, liberal democracy, rabbinical courts have legal jurisdiction on religious issues. It almost goes without saying that the rabbis involved are men, and that their edicts, if translated from religious mumbo-jumbo, would read: “This is the way things must be done because, er, because they’ve always been done this way. And besides, we say so.”

In fact, reading between the lines of the rabbinical court’s ruling, what’s clear is that the rabbis were terrified that if one defiant soul succeeded in breaking ranks, the power they have exercised unchallenged for centuries might begin to crumble.

The article was accompanied by a photo showing a circumcision ceremony taking place in a crowded synagogue. What was noticeable was that virtually all the faces were male. Barely visible, at the very back of the room, were a handful of women straining for a view of the proceedings. No prizes for guessing who calls the shots, then.

In this respect, Judaism has much in common with Islam. The blokes rule there, too, albeit in an even more repressive fashion.

Can Catholicism claim to be any better? Well, yes. Women do have a say in the Church (as they do, no doubt, in the more liberal strands of Judaism), but it’s extremely limited. Even amid the welcome winds of change blowing through the Catholic Church since the election of the new pope, you still get the impression it would be a cold day in Hell before the cardinals and the bishops relinquished their hold on power.

But what a different Church it might be if the male hierarchy were flattened and good, sensible women were allowed to get on with things unimpeded.