FR FINTAN GAVIN, the assistant chancellor of the Archdiocese of Dublin, has an interesting job. He is an expert in Canon Law and the man who meets with people who wish to leave the Catholic Church. Before the Murphy and Ryan reports, and before a website was set up offering a handy three-step process on how to defect, this might have amounted to a handful of people a year. But, since last July, Fr Gavin has dealt with around 700 letters of defection and met many of these people face to face.
On a personal level, I’ve had very little to do with the Catholic Church for the past 20 years. I’ve attended the odd family communion or christening, I’ve been to church weddings and funerals, but it was in my early teens when I decided that some of the basic laws, the rules of the club, jarred so fundamentally with my own beliefs that I couldn’t have anything to do with it myself.
(A brief recap of my fundamental jarring with the RC religion: Should this be how they wish to live their lives, I support people having sex outside of marriage, using contraception, loving/making love to people of their own sex, getting divorced and having abortions. I can’t belong to a club which preaches the opposite of this. It just wouldn’t make sense. For them or for me.)
Outside of the Catholic Church I continued to evolve spiritually, finding God in other places. Occasionally, I wondered how to go about making my non-Catholic status official, but never followed it up. Too complicated, I thought.
When I heard about countmeout.ie my first thought was why had nobody done it sooner. My second thought was, right, now I can get my name off the list of official church numbers. It took me a few minutes to print out the statement of defection and write a letter explaining why I wanted out.
Now I am hoping many more people who don’t believe and who are appalled by the sex abuse scandals and the way the church has handled them will defect, even if the word defect makes them feel like a Russian ballet dancer in the 1960s. I also think it will be a good thing if the percentage of children being baptised started to decrease.
I will be astonished if this does not happen. Imagine if the Catholic Church was a business, which in some ways it is. Imagine it was a secular organisation which had been proven to have sanctioned at the highest level the cover up of the abuse of children. I don’t think people would continue to brand their babies with that business logo from birth unless:
1) The organisation did a root and branch clear out of everyone who had been involved in the cover-up
2) Those at the top said sorry like they actually meant it
3) The chief executive stopped trying to protect the power structure of the institution and instead took full responsibility for his part in the systematic abuse of children.
Even if such a corporation did all those things, there would be a residue of mistrust that would last generations. We would be wary. Suspicious. At the very least, reluctant to get involved. I know there are massive cultural and community ties that bind this country to the Catholic Church, but this mad dash to join our children up to a deeply flawed institution is something I believe is going to change.
I told Fr Gavin in my letter, and when we met, that I was aware the church gave solace to many. I know there are thousands of nuns and priests doing good for others. The churches are full of people who truly believe. It’s not them I have a problem with.
As my colleague Fintan O’Toole wrote last week, the difficulty is not with Catholicism, it is with power. Apart from getting my own spiritual house in order, I am hoping, naïvely, I know, that somehow defecting from the church might send a message. If enough of us do it, maybe it will say, and not just to the Catholic Church, that we won’t roll over in the face of people who abuse their power. Like I said, I know it’s naïve.
I spent a very pleasant hour or so with Fr Gavin. I felt heard and understood. At the end, I shook his hand knowing that within days I would officially be a non-Catholic, a great defector from the organisation to which he has devoted much of his life.
I asked him why he didn’t leave. He gets asked that a lot. He thinks the institution can change and he can be part of that transformation. He believes the church that emerges from this crisis will be humbler, smaller, ultimately better. He is a patient man, Fr Gavin. A very busy one too, these days.
I walked out of his office feeling lighter in my soul. And if what I am saying strikes a chord, see countmeout.ie. You don’t have to go to meet Fr Gavin or one of his colleagues around the country in order to defect, but as an exit interview it’s hard to beat.
Someone else counted you in. But you can count yourself out. Leaving the Catholic religion to the true believers.
This weekend: Róisín will be throwing a first birthday party for her daughters. It will incorporate a makey-uppy naming ceremony and a sugar-free birthday cake. Somebody call the social workers.