Sir, - In his address to religious education teachers graduating from the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin on November 20th, Archbishop Connell said: "A people ashamed of its history is a people deprived of identity and roots." He went on to state: "A healthy society will acknowledge and take steps to remedy its past abuses. But its strength will come not from wholesale rejection of its past but from reliance on the forces that created the integrity of its tradition and rendered it attentive to advances in experience and knowledge."
He proceeded to outline the effort put in by the clergy over the past 50 years to show how much support the State had received from them, in particular the assistance to the poor. For this reason he asked for justice "towards the Church and to challenge the kind of revisionism that is making our children ashamed of their past."
As a middle-aged Catholic country solicitor, I do not rely on information or critics to form my own opinion. I am utterly and thoroughly ashamed of the clergy, not the Church. Over the years they handed down from altar and pulpit teachings that were false. I believed many of them at the time and when I discovered their untruth I felt abused and taken advantage of. This abuse was as pernicious as the sexual abuse then so rampant within the clergy and now so public.
Clergy preached purity in a manner that denied a healthy sexuality. Guilt was invoked as a method of making people revise their opinions to fall into line with Catholic doctrine. Women were, and continue to be, put in a second-class role.
Lay people were, and continue to be, excluded from any meaningful role within a Church allegedly following the principle of life based on the equality of love for all. The clergy did, and continued to, arrogate to themselves a monopoly of power and control based on the clerical humour of the time supported by some vestige of truth.
In my time I have been beaten physically black and blue by nuns and priests. I have seen many of my friends treated in the same way. I have many friends who are nuns and priests who are decent people, but I will let nobody say that the clergy have not a lot to be ashamed of. It is time the archbishop took account of the hostility directed towards the Church and took steps to remedy past abuses. Evidence of this is sadly lacking at the moment and indeed the speech he gave amply demonstrates evidence to the contrary. It is time to start putting the high horses that the clergy so well mounted in the past out to pasture in the fields of humility.
It is also time the clergy stopped attacking the media while at the same time attempting to use it.
Some genuine truth and honest reflection would be so much more refreshing than attempts to tell us that what we experienced never happened or in some sense is distorted. It did happen, it continues to happen and it is not distorted.
It seems the poor and the disempowered are now to be used, as if in some way the clergy were responsible for their survival. There is no question but that charity was given to the poor by Catholic institutions and this continues to be the case. There is, equally, a large measure of power exercised by those who do this. Gratitude for this assistance is a regular prerequirement rendering those who are disempowered even more so. I question the authenticity of anyone working with the poor who uses that work to justify his own image. The poor we will always have with us, but we have some choice about the clergy. Perhaps this might explain the dwindling numbers in the pews.
My sincere hope in writing this letter is that the Archbishop may understand there are people like me who are not malleable by either the media or the Church, but who are the witnesses to many clerical abuses and a system which supported and continues to support them. I, for one, will have no more of it.-Yours, etc., Simon W. Kennedy,
Charles Street, New Ross, Co Wexford.