Sex, Scandal and Secularism

Transcription

1
Contents
Introduction
3
1 The Quiet Revolution
10
2 Quebec’s Disappearing
Sacraments
15
3 From Renewal to Discord —
The Failure of Vatican II
30
4 The Second Vatican Council
38
5 Losing the Battle of the
Faithful in Ireland
45
Introduction
When I was maybe 10 years old, a new Catholic priest arrived at
our east-end Montreal parish. Spiritual transcendence was not
what he was about.
He sexually assaulted my friends, boys and girls. He abused
them in his car, in the sacristy, in his office, in the game room; he
abused them anywhere he could. I escaped being molested partly
because I wasn’t an altar boy.
When my friends and I talked about it, it was always in confusion and anger. It never crossed our minds that we could do something about it. No one I knew told their parents. The abuse went on
for at least a couple of years.
One day, the priest talked a group of us into painting the steel
railing in front of the church. He said he would buy us pizza. When
a friend replied, with a big smile, “Oh, Father, you’re so kind,” the
priest slapped him hard across the face. We were horrified.
Shortly after, he was transferred. He left behind unforgettable
lessons of crude power and hypocrisy as far from the Gospel as
one could get. What strikes me now is how common such experiences have been with the Catholic Church, even though a minority
of priests is to blame.
The first person I interviewed in Montreal for this story was
Yves Côté, a man whose church history I did not know. He grew
up in a small town in Lac-Saint-Jean, a northern Quebec region
where Jesuit missionaries began recruiting souls in the early 1600s.
“My parents were more Catholic than the pope,” he says, “especially my father.” A big bald man with a hearty laugh, Côté tugs
at the top of his ear to demonstrate the way his father enticed his
children to Sunday mass.
“Everything was in Latin back then; we understood absolutely
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nothing,” says Côté, 60. “So what were we doing there? I would tear
up the service booklet to make little paper boats.”
One day, when Côté was a child, the parish priest came to visit.
“He said to my mother, ‘When will you give a child to the
church?’” Côté recalls. “My mother said that after her eighth child
the doctor told her another one might kill her. And the priest replied, in a raised voice: ‘I said, when will you give a child to the
church?’”
Côté’s father stepped up to back his wife. “I don’t think you
heard what my wife said,” he told the priest. The priest replied,
“Yes, but you must.”
“My father took the priest by the back of his collar, opened the
door and said, ‘It’s certainly not you who will decide when my wife
dies,’” Côté says.
“That’s how we emptied churches in Quebec,” he adds. “Priests
always wanted to enter people’s bedrooms.”
—
Years later, when he was 14, Côté began questioning his sexuality.
He went to the parish priest for guidance.
“I told him I thought I was a homosexual.” The priest practically
lunged at him. “He tried to stick his hand down my pants!
“He thought I was easy prey,” Côté says. “I told him I was a
homosexual and he saw me like a lamb going to. . . ” He cut his
sentence off with a disbelieving shake of his head.
Côté had the courage to report the incident to the main parish
priest.
“He put his hands over his ears and said, ‘I’ll make as if I heard
nothing. Pray to the Lord to cure you of your illness.’
“The next day I told my parents: ‘I’m not going to church anymore.’”
Most Quebecers have made the same decision as Côté since
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the early 1960s, when francophones transformed Quebec society
in a modernizing burst known as the Quiet Revolution. Weekly
church attendance went from an estimated 90 per cent of Catholics to less than 5 per cent today. In Montreal, 40 Catholic churches
have closed in the last decade alone, according to Most Reverend
Christian Lépine, archbishop of Montreal.
“The resentment is very strong,” Lépine says, referring to how
most Quebecers feel about the Catholic Church.
“We’re in a post-Christian society,” laments Msgr. Raymond
Poisson, Auxiliary Bishop of the Diocese of Saint-Jérôme, north
of Montreal.
The Catholic Church’s fall from grace in Quebec reflects the
challenge it faces in most western countries. Pews are empty, vocations are at a trickle, and child abuse scandals continue to reveal
church authorities more interested in protecting the institution
than victims. The Vatican, meanwhile, is mired in the kind of infighting and backstabbing that makes medieval courts look tame.
The last year of Pope Benedict’s reign was characterized by
leaked papal documents linking the Vatican to money laundering, blackmail, a notorious gangster buried in a Roman basilica,
the kidnapping of a 15-year-old Vatican resident and plots to kill
Benedict and his predecessor, John Paul II. Benedict’s butler was
convicted of stealing the documents. Few believe he acted alone.
In mid-February, when the 85-year-old Benedict shocked the
Catholic world by announcing his abdication — the first pope to
do so in 600 years — he left the impression of someone fed up with
division and scandal.
“The face of the church,” he lamented in his last sermon, “is
sometimes disfigured.”
Fixing that twisted image — beginning with taming an unruly Vatican bureaucracy — will preoccupy cardinals gathering
in Rome to elect a new pope. But most remain stubbornly silent
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about the Catholic Church’s biggest challenge — fixing its shattered relationship with modernity.
Pope Benedict XVI, Christmas 2010 (Photo: Osservatore Romano/Reuters)
The issue has led to an open revolt by thousands of priests in
Europe and North America demanding a more progressive interpretation of the Second Vatican Council, the extraordinary gathering of the early 1960s, known as Vatican II, that tried to bring the
church into the 20th century.
Reformist groups like the Association of Catholic Priests
in Ireland are pushing for a more transparent, democratic and
grassroots church, one that gives lay people a greater say in parish
affairs. A church more in tune with its community, they argue,
might eventually result in a reassessment of doctrines on sexuality,
divorce, celibacy and the ordination of women.
Benedict made the troubles of the western church a priority. As
Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he set out his vision in a sermon to colleagues shortly before they elected him pope in April 2005.
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“A dictatorship of relativism is being created that doesn’t recognize anything as definitive and that leaves as the ultimate measure
its own egotism and its own desires,” he told the cardinals.
He denounced relativism as “letting oneself be swept here and
there by whatever doctrinal wind” blows. What’s needed, he said,
is “a clear faith.”
As pope, he spent eight years centralizing power in Rome, a
trend he helped launch in 1981 as his predecessor’s doctrinal enforcer. He partly blamed pedophile priests on Vatican II being
“misinterpreted,” suggesting it led to too liberal an atmosphere.
And he tried to heal a schism with the ultra-fundamentalist Society of St. Pius X, whose bishops were excommunicated in 1988 for
rejecting Vatican II reforms. Those negotiations ultimately failed.
Benedict’s vision was interpreted by many as a call for a smaller,
more traditional and more fervent band of followers in the western church.
“The big tendency of the institution in Rome and of the church
in Quebec is one of retreat,” says Jean-Claude Ravet, editor-inchief of Relations, a magazine published by a Jesuit-funded centre
in Montreal. “It’s a turning inwards that will result in a caricature
of the church and its decline into a sect.”
Some church authorities sound indeed like they’ve given up on
the church regaining its moral authority in western societies, noting its growth has shifted to Asia, Africa and Latin America.
“The church has to forget about the West being at the head of
the church,” says Poisson, the Saint-Jérôme bishop. “That’s over.
The church will be in the South and we’ll have to make room for it.”
Poisson believes even Quebec’s Cardinal Marc Ouellet, one of
the front-runners to become pope, won’t attract more Quebecers to
the church if elected. In fact, many Catholic observers say Ouellet
made matters worse when he was archbishop of Quebec City from
2002 to 2010. His was a conservative vision and reproachful style.
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“People say, ‘The cardinal is completely disconnected from
Quebec reality,’” a Radio-Canada journalist told Ouellet in a televised interview in 2008. “There are many critics who say Cardinal
Ouellet lives on another planet.”
Quebec bishops have at least understood the challenge. In a
document published in January by the Assembly of Quebec Catholic Bishops, they describe the province as having been influenced
“by a trend that is virtually without precedent in human history:
many people no longer turn to religion as a guide to the conduct of
their lives. For them, it simply is not relevant. This is an outcome of
what is called ‘secularization.’
“Ultimately, the process of secularization can lead to a culture
and lifestyle that make no reference to God, to the sacred or to a
religious perspective,” the bishops added.
—
Why should secular societies care if the western church might be
going the way of the dodo bird? Why not bid it good riddance
when spiritual sustenance can be found outside a “disfigured”
institution? I’ve often asked those questions while covering the
Catholic Church intermittently during the past 13 years.
Along the way, I have watched Pope John Paul II, hobbled by
Parkinson’s, shuffle to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, an image
that brought to life 2,000 years of western history. Five years later,
I watched his corpse transported across St. Peter’s Square, blue
sky framing the basilica’s dome, the Litany of the Saints chanting
through loudspeakers, a mesmerized crowd thick with grief. It was
ritual in its highest form, performance art that touched the soul.
History and ritual carry little weight in a high-speed culture
that turned the pendant cross into bling. Reform-minded Catholics will argue, however, that democracy, peace, altruism, social
justice and redistribution of wealth are concepts deeply rooted in
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the Gospel. In the name of these values, the Catholic Church has
condemned war, organized labour unions and charities, educated
the poor, trained community leaders to fight for human rights and,
in Latin America during the 1960s and ’70s, put priests at the forefront of struggles against dictatorship.
The world can use that kind of a Catholic Church. In the last
three decades, however, the Vatican has slapped down leading
voices in liberation theology, a movement arising from Vatican II
that positioned Jesus as a revolutionary and encouraged social activism. Instead it has focused public debate on issues that impact
people’s private lives — contraception, homosexuality, abortion
and divorce, to name a few. For reform-minded Catholics, democracy and social justice should instead be at the heart of the church’s
mission.
“Our first worry is not the church but the world,” says Gregory
Baum, a renowned Catholic theologian appointed by the pope as
an adviser at the Second Vatican Council. “We’re worried about
the drift to the right, the undermining of the welfare state and the
war against the unions.”
“We have to put these great democratic values at the heart of
the church,” Ravet says. “If we do, we can break this very strong
image people have of a church that is fundamentally anti-modern.”
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1
The Quiet Revolution
The presence of the Catholic Church in Quebec dates back to 1534,
when Jacques Cartier and his French shipmates celebrated the first
mass on the shores of the Gaspé Peninsula. Catholic missionaries
entered forests to bring the Gospel to aboriginal peoples, converting few and wiping out many with European diseases.
“For the settlers, far from the ancient world they had known,
the presence of the church was a reminder of a European way of
life and a sign that God was with them in their new life,” Lucia
Ferretti, history professor with the University of Quebec in TroisRivières, told the Toronto Star.
When the English beat the French on the Plains of Abraham
in 1759, the French elite fled back to France, leaving the Catholic clergy as the only French representatives to liaise with the new
English elite.
“The church took upon itself the destiny of the French Canadian nation,” says Rev. Gilles Routhier, a theologian at Laval University in Quebec City.
The distinctions were clear for all to see: English Canadians
were Protestants and French Canadians were Catholics.
“A whole socio-political reality was reduced to religious identity,” says sociologist and religious historian Raymond Lemieux,
professor emeritus at Laval. “That gave the Catholic Church a very
important position in framing the culture.”
As the English bourgeoisie took control of the economy, the
church urged French Canadians to continue working the land and
having babies as a means to protect an identity whose central elements were defined as Catholicism and the French language. The
church set up schools and hospitals and provided social services.
In the late 1800s, when poverty pushed farmers off the land
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and into factories south of the border, the Catholic Church tried to
divert migration to available land in Manitoba and northern Ontario, “dreaming of a Franco-Catholic line extending from Boniface to Abitibi, passing through Sudbury,” Lemieux says, adding,
“At the beginning of the 20th century, a triumphant church was
expressing itself.”
Crowds at Montreal’s St. James Cathedral (Photo: Toronto Star archives)
The church banned dancing in parishes, railed against books
and films it wanted banned and dictated sexual mores. Women
who planned families with the rhythm method were denounced
as sinful.
“With sex, anything outside of marriage was a mortal sin,” says
a Quebec City-area priest ordained in 1965, who asked not to be
named. “Sexual temptation was attributed to Satan. The confessor
priest had to know the number of times you were involved with
sex and the circumstances. People were made to feel guilty.”
The church was omnipresent but not all-powerful. In some
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communities priests raised the ire of residents and were run out of
town. Bishops preached against giving women the vote, describing it as a threat to family and faith. Yet in 1940 Quebec’s Liberal
government enfranchised women, albeit 23 years after the federal
government had done so.
To Robert McKenzie, a lapsed Presbyterian Scot who landed in
Montreal in 1956, the Catholic influence was striking. City buses
had stickers of a portrait of Jesus Christ with the words, “Do not
swear.”
His first job was selling French-language bibles at $36 a book in
the Montreal-area suburbs on the south shore of the St. Lawrence
River. He quickly figured out that if he sold one to an influential
resident on a street, the neighbours “fell like dominoes.”
One day McKenzie was arrested by police officers who suspected he was a Jehovah’s Witness — part of Premier Maurice Duplessis’ crackdown on the group. A Catholic priest at the police station
saw McKenzie’s bibles and told police to let him go.
At 7 every evening, McKenzie would inevitably be invited
to join a kneeling family in front of a radio, praying along with
the “Chapelet en famille,” also known as the “crusade of the rosary.” Msgr. Paul-Émile Léger of the Montreal diocese began the
15-minute program on the CKAC station in 1950 to prepare people for the centenary of the Immaculate Conception doctrine. The
program was so popular that rival Radio-Canada had to move a
competing flagship show whose ratings plummeted. The religious
broadcast continued until 1970.
McKenzie became a journalist and in 1967 moved to Paris as
the Toronto Star’s correspondent. He returned to Montreal two
years later and learned that the Catholic priest who married him
had left the priesthood and married. One day, McKenzie was walking the hallways of the University of Montreal and noticed a crowd
of students in front of a display window. Members of the social sci12
ences faculty were conducting some kind of experiment: “A couple
of naked students had been sleeping, eating and fornicating publicly for several days,” says the now retired McKenzie.
“Quebec had changed radically in two years.”
The Quiet Revolution was in full swing. Part of it involved
changes happening throughout the western world. There was, for
example, the introduction of television in the 1950s, promoting
conspicuous consumption like a new religion.
“Suddenly there’s a TV set preaching every night in people’s living rooms while the priest is still preaching in the church,” says
Lemieux, the sociologist. “He couldn’t compete.”
The cultural revolution of the 1960s, with its free love and antiestablishment ethic, played no small role either. The 1968 studentled upheavals in Europe are said to have turned a disapproving
Joseph Ratzinger from a moderate church reformer into a staunch
conservative.
Some changes, however, were uniquely Québécois. The Quiet
Revolution’s hallmark was the rise of a French-Canadian middle
class taking control of an economy long dominated by the anglophone minority — a process captured by the slogan, “Maîtres chez
nous — masters in our own house.” At the same time, the provincial government expanded into health, education and social services.
To displace the church as arbiter of French Canadian culture
and identity, the new bourgeoisie invented what Lemieux calls
“the myth of la grande noirceur” — the great darkness. The widely
used label accused the church and government of keeping francophone Quebecers ignorant and repressed for generations.
“If you claim to bring the light, you of course have to say all that
came before you was dark,” explains Lemieux.
In fact, “the Quiet Revolution was largely conceived with the
participation, if not the leadership, of clerics,” he adds.
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The church hierarchy wasn’t part of the movement. But there
was no shortage of priests and Catholic organizations that were.
The most renowned was Rev. Georges-Henri Lévesque, known
simply as Father Lévesque. He set up the social sciences faculty
at Laval University, helped modernize post-secondary education
and, along with other priests in church-run “classical colleges,”
educated some of the revolution’s leaders.
Leaders also emerged from Catholic youth movements, cooperatives and unions, one of which became the powerful CSN
union, a key player in the Quiet Revolution. Facing growing demands for services while strained for cash, the church was glad to
give the state greater control of hospitals and schools.
Yet the new society that emerged saw itself as having ruptured with the past. Quebec writer Paul-Émile Roy has compared
it to deciding suddenly that history before the Quiet Revolution
amounted to nothing more than the shameful existence of a conquered people.
“When we read the books of that period,” Roy wrote about the
1960s and ’70s, “when we listen to the songs or look at the plays
presented, we get the impression those people thought they were
starting from scratch, that nothing valuable existed before them.
“History was put on trial, as was the church.”
This generation that made the Quiet Revolution passed on contempt of the church to their children. Their grandchildren today
are indifferent at best.
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2
Quebec’s Disappearing Sacraments
I’m usually working when I attend mass. When the sermon starts
my attention inevitably wanders; most priests couldn’t make the
Gospel relevant if the Second Coming depended on it. The one
moment I find touching is when the priest says, “Let us offer each
other the sign of peace,” and I suddenly find myself shaking hands
with complete strangers wishing me serenity. There’s something
promising in that contact.
The big outdoor masses John Paul II became famous for always
seemed incongruous spectacles. Even papal services at cavernous St. Peter’s Basilica, despite the obvious beauty, feel distant and
cold. Maybe it’s all the polished marble.
Montreal’s Saint-Jérôme cathedral, finished in 1900, is nothing
like that. The floor is mosaic tile, the wooden benches and columns
are painted soft cream and the tall stained glass windows bathe the
space in light filtered through deep reds and blues. Like so many
old churches in Canada, it feels like a nice place to sit and think.
It seemed all the more inviting on a late February weekday. First
catching my attention were two confession boxes being used for
storage. They were stuffed with stacked chairs and folded tables.
The cathedral then filled with a soaring voice.
Six people stood in front of a wooden carving of the first station
of the cross, depicting Jesus condemned to death. They read aloud
from the Bible, knelt to pray, and then a round man with a five
o’clock shadow led them to the next station, singing.
It took them 45 minutes to reach the 14th and final station,
where Jesus is laid in a tomb. The round man then left the group
and wandered around, glancing at his Bible and singing in a voice
that makes people think of angels.
His name is Pierre Forgues.
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“I’m someone who abused alcohol and other things in my life,”
says Forgues, 53. “Through that experience I cried to God for help.
“I was empty inside. I sometimes say that I was missing a piece
of the puzzle and this is the missing piece,” he adds, pointing to a
small cross hanging from a beaded rosary around his neck. “For
others it can be whatever they want, but for me it’s Christ I need.
“I don’t pray because I’m virtuous. I have no choice. There was
an emptiness that He filled.”
I ask if his path to salvation had to necessarily pass through the
Catholic Church.
“Ah, good question,” he says. “In the end, each person is a
church. There’s only one church, that of Christ. Maybe I could have
started a church, I don’t know. The real church is the one that links
us in love and charity with others.”
For every Pierre Forgues, waves of others in Quebec have
turned away from the church. In 1990, sociologist Raymond
Lemieux coined the phrase “cultural Catholicism” to describe a
society that no longer practiced the religion yet still saw it as part
of its identity. Baptisms, church marriages and funerals were rituals still performed in high numbers. In 2001, the last census data
on the question, 83 per cent of Quebecers described themselves as
Catholic.
Today, even cultural Catholicism is on the way out. In 1969,
according to Quebec government statistics, 98 per cent of all marriages were religious. That dropped to 72 per cent in 1990 and 54
per cent in 2011. During those 42 years, civil marriages went from
2 per cent to 46 per cent. In 1969, only 8 per cent of babies were
born to non-married couples. In 2011, it was 63 per cent.
The number of people describing themselves as Roman
Catholic, according to a February CROP poll, is now 57 per
cent. Priests report that funeral masses, like baptisms, are also
decreasing rapidly.
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From 2001 to 2006, the number of babies baptized in Quebec,
compared to the total born, declined from 73.5 per cent to 60 per
cent, according to a study by three University of Ottawa sociologists. In the Saint-Jérôme Diocese, which has 407,000 Catholic
residents, Bishop Poisson estimates that only half of francophone
Catholic families baptize their babies.
“We baptize them, and then we never see them again,” he says.
“Then you have a service like a funeral, which brings together
many people. You give them communion and they say, ‘Thank you
very much,’ Poisson adds, rolling his eyes. “You don’t have to have
a big course on Catholicism to know that you should say, ‘Amen.’
They don’t even know that.”
The Quebec City priest who did not want to be named describes giving church tours to children and naming the standard
sacred items used during mass, like the tabernacle, the chalice and
the host.
“They start giggling. They can’t understand why a priest would
be swearing,” he says, referring to the long established Quebec
habit of using religious objects as curse words.
Poisson believes much of the religious ignorance is a result of
Quebec’s shift, beginning in 1998, from public schools based on
religion to boards based on the French and English languages. Students no longer study catechism. Neither are they marched “like a
regiment,” as Poisson puts it, to Catholic rites of first communion
and confirmation. They now get courses in “ethics and religious
culture” taught by lay teachers.
—
Poisson bucked the trend of the Quiet Revolution, a period that
saw the number of student priests drop from about 300 in each
of Quebec’s two seminaries to six resident seminarians in Quebec
City and about a dozen in Montreal.
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Chatty and outgoing, he looks younger than his 54 years. He
brings his pet collie to work, a friendly dog he had bought for his
mother, who had Alzheimer’s and recently died. He grew up in
Saint-Jean-Baptiste de Rouville, a village of about 3,000 a halfhour drive south of Montreal.
When he was 6, his 12-year-old sister died from an illness. “My
mother was demolished,” he says. His parents went to the local
parish priest for help.
“I was there and I saw how that man did them so much good,”
Poisson says. “I said to myself — that’s what I want to do.
“Time passed, it’s in my head, and when people would ask me
what I wanted to do, I’d say, ‘I want to be a priest.’ And then people
would say to my parents, ‘Oh, he has time to change his mind.’
“If I had told them I wanted to be a doctor, they would have
said, ‘Great, work hard, my boy — keep it up.’ That bothered me,”
Poisson says.
At 12 he wanted to learn the pipe organ. “But in the 1970s in
Quebec we had go-go masses — the drums, the guitars; I changed
churches three times before finding one where the priest loved
great music,” he says.
By the time he entered the two-year, pre-university CEGEP
program, “All my friends were Catholics who didn’t practise their
religion.” He had become an anomaly. He finished his religious
studies in Rome and came back determined to wear the priestly
Roman collar at a time when many Quebec priests wore regular
shirts.
He formed a support group of five like-minded priests who
regularly met for dinner. Three are now bishops.
“We all passed through the hands of Cardinal Ouellet, that’s for
sure,” Poisson says. “He’s a great man.”
Many observers tell a different story, one of a conservative, outof-touch cardinal who spent eight years haranguing and grating
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Quebecers while archbishop of Quebec City. Ouellet also upset
Quebec bishops, many of whom had a more progressive approach
to the church’s challenges.
Cardinal Marc Ouellet and Pope John Paul II in 2003 (Photo: Massimo
Sambucetti/The Associated Press photo)
The biggest clash occurred during the 2008 government commission on accommodating religions in a secular society. In a personal brief to the commission, he called for a return to the study of
religion in public schools, through courses designed and funded
by the Catholic Church. He did it by lashing out at Quebec society.
“The real problem in Quebec is a spiritual void created by a religious and cultural rupture, a substantial loss of memory, bringing
with it a crisis of family and education that leaves citizens disoriented, unmotivated, subject to instability and tied to passing and
superficial values,” Ouellet told the commission.
“A people whose identity has been strongly configured for centuries by the Catholic faith cannot one day to the next. . . empty
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itself of its substance without grave consequences at all levels.
“Thus the disarray of young people, the vertiginous drop in
marriages, the tiny birthrate, and the frightening level of abortions
and suicides. . .
“To top it all off, this spiritual and cultural void is maintained
by an anti-Catholic rhetoric stuffed with clichés unfortunately too
often found in the media. It favours a real culture of shame and
contempt with regards to our religious heritage, which destroys
Quebec’s soul.
“It is high time to ask ourselves: Quebec, what have you done
with your baptism? It is high time we put a brake on secular fundamentalism. . . ”
“It’s especially important at the moment that the Catholic majority wake up, that it recognizes its real spiritual needs and that
it takes up again its traditional practices so it can be equal to the
mission it has been responsible for since its origins.”
In short, Ouellet described modern Quebec, built by the Quiet
Revolution, as a fiasco. It made him a lot of enemies. Reports in the
mainstream media uniformly portrayed him as reactionary and
disconnected from the province where he was born.
Tellingly, the brief by the Assembly of Quebec Catholic Bishops
had none of the fire and brimstone Ouellet delivered. It urged the
commission to take a positive view of religion, to help immigrants
settle and get jobs, and to encourage dialogue in a pluralist society.
The bishops didn’t call for a return of religion in public schools,
likely because, after years of negotiating with governments intent
on eliminating religious school boards, the assembly accepted the
inevitable.
Sister Gisèle Turcot, secretary general of the bishops’ assembly
from 1976 to 1980, describes Ouellet as “nostalgic and not living
in the modern world.” He made clear to all, she adds, that he had
become the point man of a conservative Vatican hierarchy.
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“He was the Roman among us,” she says.
Ouellet’s brief to the commission caused such a backlash that
he issued what he titled, “An open letter to Quebec Catholics: In
search of Quebec’s pride.” He reiterated his arguments and tacked
on a sweeping apology.
“As Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada, I recognize
that narrow attitudes of certain Catholics, before 1960, favoured
anti-Semitism, racism, indifference toward First Nations and discrimination with regards to women and homosexuals,” he wrote.
“The behaviour of certain Episcopal authorities with regards to
the right to vote, access to work and the advancement of women
was not always equal to the needs of society, nor did it conform to
the church’s social doctrine.
“I also recognize that abuses of power and the bearing of false
witness have tarnished the image of the clergy among many, and
hurt its moral authority. . .
“Youths were subjected to sexual assaults by priests and members of religious orders, causing them grave damage and trauma
that broke their lives! These scandals shook the confidence of people toward religious authorities, and we understand that! Forgive
us for all that pain!” (Ouellet used the word mal, which could also
mean “wrongs” or “evil.”)
Outrage over sex abuse by priests exploded in the early 1990s,
when it was revealed that thousands of orphans in the 1940s and
’50s were wrongly diagnosed as mentally ill and placed in insane
asylums. Later known as Duplessis Orphans, many were sexually
abused by Catholic priests.
There are currently two class action lawsuits in Quebec against
Catholic religious orders. One claims sexual abuse of children at
the hands of Redemptorist priests in a seminary near Quebec City.
The other involves 64 victims allegedly abused at a church-run
boarding school for the deaf in Montreal. Accused are 28 religious
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staff, members of the Clerics of St-Viateur, and six lay workers. The
suit claims that violent sexual assaults occurred regularly at the allboys school between 1940 and 1982.
“Quebec remains a paradise for pedophile priests,” says Carlo Tarini, spokesperson for Victims of Priests, a Montreal-based
group. “We hope Ouellet becomes pope because it will draw attention to the many pedophile cases in Quebec and Montreal, and
how he didn’t lift a finger to help victims.”
In 2010, Ouellet went to Ottawa for an anti-abortion march in
front of Parliament. He then proclaimed that abortion was wrong
even in cases of rape, causing more outrage and condemnation,
including from Quebec government ministers.
The assembly of bishops issued a statement that didn’t name
Ouellet or support his position. It instead called for a “rational
public dialogue,” noting that while the Vatican sees the moment of
conception as life worth protecting, it is “a conviction not shared
by all our fellow citizens.”
Shortly after, when Pope Benedict appointed Ouellet prefect of
the Congregation for Bishops, based at the Vatican, a spokesperson for the bishops’ assembly practically apologized for his behaviour in Quebec.
“He’s an emotional person who reacts quickly and at times lets
himself be swept away by his emotions, his sentiments, his affection,” Msgr. Martin Veillette, Bishop of Trois-Rivières, told The
Canadian Press.
“It’s not surprising that Cardinal Ouellet, who was absent (from
Quebec) for a good number of years, is not able to have the same
grasp of questions and situations” as Quebec bishops, he added,
citing Ouellet’s call for religion in schools as an example.
Poisson, who was appointed bishop on Ouellet’s
recommendation eight months ago, sees much of the criticism
as the work of journalists who cover the Catholic Church as they
22
would a political party.
“The goal of the church is not to convert the population but
to be what it must be — a sign of something different in Quebec
society,” he says.
“Jesus wasn’t understood, but he didn’t compromise either.
By compromising, the church won’t be more popular in Quebec.
Msgr. Ouellet reminded us of the fundamental principles of the
church, a certain fidelity to the Gospel that is very demanding.”
—
The Saint-Pierre-Apôtre Catholic church, completed in 1875, is a
neo-gothic masterpiece in the heart of Montreal’s gay village. It’s
owned by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, an order
founded in France in the early 1800s. But much of the church
is run by Yves Côté, the man who left Catholicism as a teenager
when a priest in northern Quebec tried to sexually assault him.
On a recent Sunday, as parishioners filed through the doors for
mass, Côté was like a master of ceremonies. He welcomed people
with warm handshakes and inquired about family and health.
In a Catholic Church where Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now the
retired Pope Benedict, once described homosexuality as an “objective disorder,” Saint-Pierre-Apôtre might seem an extraordinary
anomaly.
A survey taken during four consecutive Sunday masses found
that 80 per cent of worshippers are gay. They come from across the
city and its suburbs; only 19 live in the downtown gay village.
“Most of the people who come here are excluded or feel excluded,” says Côté, who heads the church council. “They’ve been rejected because of their homosexuality, often by their own families.
“Here, the priest doesn’t ask, before he gives you communion,
‘Who did you sleep with yesterday?’ ” Côté adds. “Christ welcomed
people unconditionally. And I have the good fortune of working in
23
a church that is in His image because it is open to all.”
It’s an attractive approach. Côté says summer Sunday masses
regularly fill with 400 people. When I visited, on a Sunday winter
morning, about 250 worshippers were there. Some took a moment
to pray at a chapel dedicated to victims of AIDS. Pictures of the
dead have lined its walls since 1996.
Côté told his parents he was gay shortly after vowing never to
return to a Catholic church. “My father blamed my mother and my
mother blamed my father,” he says, describing their reaction. Years
later he moved to Montreal.
Two decades ago, when he was 40, Côté felt spiritually empty. He wanted to be with people that shared profound yet simple Christian values like “love thy neighbour.” At breakfast with
friends in the gay village one morning, he told them of giving the
church another chance.
“They said, ‘You’re crazy. You’re gay. You know what the church
thinks of gays.’ I said, ‘You don’t understand my need.’ ”
He stepped out of the coffee shop and heard church bells ringing. He followed the sound to Saint-Pierre-Apôtre. Pushing past
the heavy wood doors, Côté heard the priest say, “When I agreed
to be the parish priest here, I told the cardinal it was on one condition — that I can open wide the doors of the church to anyone who
wants to live his faith regardless of his sexual orientation.”
“I started to cry,” Côté says. “Don’t ask me what the priest said
after that because I sat and cried all the tears in my body. For the
first time in my life I felt welcome in the church.”
He expressed his gratitude to the priest. After a long talk he
was offered a $25,000-a-year job as a full-time council member, focused on community outreach. He was making twice that amount
waiting tables at a swanky restaurant but took the church job in a
flash.
“A priest once told me the Catholic Church is holy but its feet
24
stink,” Côté says. “If I can make it stink less, I’ll have done something.”
His office is in the Oblates’ residence attached to the church. It
has a big poster of a milk carton with the words, “Homo — it’s not
ugly.” During the gay pride parade he staffs a booth advertising the
church next to booths that sell sex toys.
On the side of the stone church, Côté hung a sign with a rainbow-coloured fish and a quote from the Old Testament’s Book of
Wisdom. It says “God loves all He created.” It’s a truth Côté says
the church hierarchy has trouble applying.
“They told us we were errors,” he says, referring to his interpretation of the Vatican’s views on gays. “That’s accusing God of
getting it wrong, and God doesn’t get it wrong. He created me as
he wanted to.”
Côté is careful to exclude no one. The church provides services
to homeless youth no matter what their sexuality. Côté makes sure
the seven-member church council includes women and heterosexuals. At the mass I attended, he told parishioners he had shut down
the church’s Facebook site because politically charged comments
about homosexuality had taken over.
“Saying that Saint-Pierre-Apôtre is a gay church would be anything but inclusive,” he told parishioners. “What distinguishes us is
precisely the place we give to all people who want to live their faith,
without regard to sexual orientation.”
Cardinal Jean-Claude Turcotte, Archbishop Emeritus of Montreal, has said mass at the church on international AIDS day. But
official acceptance of someone like Côté remains problematic.
People who do Côté’s job are officially known as pastoral agents.
Getting the title, Côté says, requires “a mandate from the bishop.”
He says the church has never applied for one on his behalf — he
would be refused because he’s gay. Why not just keep quiet about
that fact, I ask.
25
“I spent a lot of years in the closet,” he says. “Once you open the
door and breathe, you don’t want to go back in. I won’t go back in
that closet even for a mandate from the bishop.”
The priest celebrating mass the Sunday I visited was Rev. Raymond Gravel, an itinerant priest based in the Diocese of Joliette,
northeast of Montreal. Ask him what the church is doing wrong
and he barely stops for breath.
“We have to completely change our dogmatic approach,” says
Gravel, 60. “It doesn’t make sense — we’re closing the door to
everyone. “Why do we condemn people non-stop when Jesus
never condemned anyone?” he adds. “We condemn the divorced,
homosexuals and intellectuals who dare say something that bothers the magisterium. How many theologians do we silence or excommunicate? It’s crazy — they’re the cream of our church and we
throw them out.
“If the pope is the Vicar of Christ then he should act like Christ.
Christ ate with prostitutes, he ate with sinners — he didn’t condemn them, he reached out to them.
“So how do we engage people so that they can be better? If the
church doesn’t do that it will die. At the moment we are managing
the death of the church. Our bishop said to us the other day during a meeting with priests that in 2040 the Diocese of Joliette won’t
exist if the trend continues.
“We live in a society where everything is fast and people are
more educated. So rather than tilt at windmills, people leave,” says
Gravel, who supports the ordination of women priests.
Gravel has had a colourful past. He has admitted to working
as a prostitute before becoming a priest in 1986. He was elected a
Member of Parliament for the sovereignist Bloc Québécois party
in 2006. Two years later, upset by his support of same-sex marriage, the Vatican told him to choose between the church and politics. Gravel resigned his seat.
26
He is sometimes described as a maverick priest. But the number of Catholic clerics in western countries expressing similar reformist views has grown to create a deep split in the church. Their
battle cry is the Second Vatican Council, whose historic reforms
they insist were blocked by a Vatican hierarchy bent on centralizing power and preserving outdated doctrines.
Rev. Alain Roy, who teaches at Montreal’s seminary and runs a
parish on the island’s western tip, notes that a conservative church
attracts conservative student priests. Unless issues like priestly
celibacy are debated now, the next generation of priests may have
no desire to do so. Yet Roy hears only silence from the Quebec
hierarchy.
“No one is saying anything — not the older bishops and not
the newer ones,” says Roy, 57. “As a priest, I’m still waiting to see if
there’s a pilot in the plane.”
Roy says his parish of Saint-Joachim attracts a fair number of
worshippers on weekends. It’s a different story in the three rural
parishes he serves in the summer.
“I look at how old the people who come to mass are and I’m
thinking, ‘In 10 or 15 years there will be almost no trace of Christian life here,” says Roy, former director of liturgical services at the
Archdiocese of Montreal.
If reformed and managed properly, Roy sees promise in a
smaller Catholic Church in Quebec. He compares it to reducing
maple syrup until it has the perfect sweet taste.
His boss, Most Rev. Christian Lépine, Archbishop of Montreal,
acknowledges that the sex abuse scandals have created much resentment. He opened the door during our interview to the possibility of a public apology. But he insists that reconciliation can
best occur if both lay people and priests emulate Christ’s example.
“The problem is that in the practical, institutional life (of the
church), people live experiences that distance them from the fig27
ure of Jesus Christ,” he says. “The church has to evangelize itself.”
Doing so will help make the institution and its priests “credible
witnesses of the faith.”
—
Yves Côté’s belief runs deep. In 2000, he was diagnosed with “lymphoma type T,” a cancer involving cells that kill pathogens and
regulate the immune system. The doctor told him it could be controlled, but not cured.
His parish priest announced the bad news during Sunday mass.
The next day, a parishioner brought him two small bottles of oil
from St. Joseph’s Oratory, the Catholic landmark on a slope of
Montreal’s Mount Royal. It was founded in 1905 by Brother Andre, who was made a saint by the Vatican in 2010. He used oil to
apparently cure hundreds of people, although he always insisted it
was faith that cured, not the oil.
The cancer had caused sores all over Côté’s body and squeezed
his voice to a high pitch. He dabbed the oil on the sores he could
reach and next morning, he says, they were gone. The next night,
he drank a couple of drops of oil with water and woke up hours
later with his voice back to normal.
Weeks later he went to an appointment with his oncologist. She
did a battery of tests and found no cancer. “I know it’s hard to believe!” Côté shouts when I make a face.
In any event, Côté thinks it will take a heavy dose of St. Joseph’s
oil to give the church any chance of regaining its moral authority
in Quebec. “It will take a miracle,” he says.
“I hope that the one who comes out pope will be someone who
has been close to poverty and misery. I hope he’s someone who
knows what’s going on in real life.
“With a pope like that, people might hear a different message
and say, ‘Ah, that doesn’t sound all that crazy.’ We won’t fill the
28
churches again but at least there will be a renewal.”
29
3
From Renewal to Discord —
The Failure of Vatican II
Rev. Seamus Ryan, a gentle Catholic priest on the verge of retirement, lives in a cluttered home next to St. Matthew’s Parish, where
he ministers to a precipitously decreasing flock from the workingclass Dublin neighbourhood of Ballyfermot.
On a fall day that threatened rain, he sat with a cup of tea in
a comfortable armchair, relaxing after having married a young
couple. Baptisms, marriages and funerals still keep priests busy in
Ireland. But, like his counterparts in Quebec, Ryan takes little solace from a church reduced to what some call a “hatch, match and
dispatch” service.
“People have lost contact with the church,” he says. “At the
wedding today, they were no longer familiar with the responses.
They’ve lost the language, even. There’s just a silence.”
It was all very different when Ryan became a priest in the early
1960s. The pews were packed. The Irish Catholic Church was arbiter of all things spiritual and most things temporal. It ran schools,
towered over governments and dictated sexual mores with the
menace of fire and brimstone and the whack of classroom rulers.
At the most venerated sporting event in the land, the all-Ireland
Gaelic football final, a bishop would toss out the game-opening
ceremonial ball after team captains kissed his ring.
At 75, Ryan isn’t nostalgic for the church that was. He misses
the church that could have been.
Five decades ago, Pope John XXIII challenged Roman Catholics
to “throw open the windows of the church.” On Oct. 11, 1962, he
inaugurated the Second Vatican Council, an extraordinary gathering of some 2,600 theologians, priests, bishops and cardinals. Its
historic reforms redefined the church and its role in modern life.
30
They energized clerics and laity, unleashed an army of militants
for social justice and helped make Roman Catholicism a global
religion of more than 1 billion members.
Pope John XXIII (Photo: Toronto Star file photo)
“It was an extraordinary experience,” says Canadian Bishop
Remi De Roo, 88, who participated in Vatican II as a voting member. “It was a great invitation to get out there and get our hands
dirty and really get into the fray of history, and work for transformation.”
The seeds of renewal, however, also developed into sources of
31
deep discord. Fifty years later, the council’s reforms are the cause of
a bitter clash between the Vatican and its conservative supporters
on one side, and a growing rebellion froam reform-minded priests
and parishioners on the other.
“The major crisis in the church right now is we’re not talking
to one another,” says theologian Margaret Lavin of Toronto’s Regis
College. “We’re screaming and shouting at each other and naming
and blaming one another.”
“It’s quite shameful and sinful that we have got ourselves into
this,” she adds. “Why is my fellow believer calling me names because I have a specific interpretation of Vatican II?
“What credibility do we have if we can’t talk amongst ourselves?”
This summer, Oxford professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, a leading historian of Christianity, described the church on the verge of
schism “over the Vatican’s failure to listen to European Catholics”
about Vatican II. Few repeat that warning, and rebels insist they
want to work within the church.
“I’m insulted when people call me a dissident,” says Rev. Brendan Hoban, a founder of the Irish reform group, the Association of
Catholic Priests. “I’ve been at the heart of the church for 40 years.”
Still, many warn of a Roman Catholic church reduced to a sect,
or worse.
“The church has to listen to its people,” Hoban says. “The stakes
are huge. This is about the implosion of a church. This is about
something disappearing.”
In many ways, the church is being torn by a classic power struggle. Reformers say Vatican II calls for a more decentralized and
democratic church; the Vatican has instead spent the past 30 years
centralizing control and cracking down on doctrinal opposition.
A church in tune with modernity was a central theme of Vatican II, and reformers believe a more grassroots institution is the
32
way to achieve that. In the process, doctrines preventing women
from being ordained, priests from being married, contraceptives
from being used and divorced Catholics from receiving communion must at least be reviewed, if not changed.
The backdrop to the battle is a Roman Catholic church in crisis in Europe and North America. Vocations to the priesthood are
drying up and sex abuse scandals reveal a hierarchy often more
interested in protecting the institution than protecting children.
“The church is 200 years behind the times,” Cardinal Carlo
Martini told an Italian journalist in comments he approved before
his death in late August. “Why doesn’t it stir? Are we afraid?”
“Our culture has become old,” the highly respected cardinal
added in his missive from the grave, “our churches and our religious houses are big and empty, the bureaucratic apparatus of the
church grows, our rites and our dress are pompous.”
In this atmosphere of crisis, rebellious reform groups are multiplying. Hoban’s association began two years ago and already represents 1,000 of Ireland’s 4,500 priests. In Austria, a group called
Preachers’ Initiative, which says it represents 10 per cent of the
country’s Catholic priests, has issued a “Call to Disobedience”
manifesto that demands the ordination of women and an end to
priestly celibacy. Groups in Germany and the United States are
making similar noises.
Parishioners are making themselves heard, too. In Ireland,
where the church faces its most dire survival challenge, lay Catholics are in the throes of forming an umbrella group that brings together existing reform organizations, such as We Are Church, and
parishioners are active for the first time.
“For too long we’ve had no say in the church,” says Noel McCann, 61, a member of the fledgling organization’s steering committee. “It’s time that the rights and roles of the baptized be recognized and given an appropriate place.”
33
McCann has been a churchgoer in Howth, near Dublin, for
much of his life. For years he helped celebrate Sunday mass with
bible readings. If a church event needed organizing, McCann was
there. Then the sex abuse scandals shook Ireland, the faithful left in
droves, and McCann witnessed a church “very slow to apologize.”
The final straw for McCann came when the Vatican introduced
a new translation of the mass late last year without consultations.
Some priests have described the new wording as sexist and awkward, and are refusing to use it.
“People won’t come back to a church that is totally clerically
based and hierarchical, that marginalizes women or divorced people or gays,” says McCann, a retired commandant in the Irish military. “I don’t think Jesus would have marginalized these people.
That wasn’t his message.”
“We’re not arguing for women priests or married priests, but we
want those issues addressed,” he adds. “This is our last chance. If
we don’t do something about this, in 20 or 25 years there won’t be
anything left of the church.”
Pope Benedict XVI, whose pontificate before his abdication
was marked by missteps, scandal and jostling to succeed him,
has responded with a characteristic No. He has silenced dissident
priests, and in his Holy Thursday homily this spring, told rebels to
practise a “radicalism of obedience.”
In April, the Vatican cracked down on the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which focuses on issues of social justice
and represents 80 per cent of U.S. nuns. The Vatican department
that once led the Inquisition has accused the nuns of espousing
“radical feminist” views, of violating church teachings on homosexuality and the ordination of women, and of staying silent about
abortion. It appointed a team of bishops to straighten out the nuns’
“doctrinal confusion.”
The nuns responded with respectful defiance. Their work for al34
ternatives to patriarchy and unbridled competition, they insisted,
is “heeding the call of Vatican II.” In August, the group’s outgoing
president said the Vatican’s move triggered a “groundswell of support” for the nuns from both priests and laity.
“Clearly, they share our concern at the intolerance of dissent,”
Pat Farrell told the group’s general assembly in St. Louis, “(and) the
continued curtailing of the role of women.”
Increasing the anxiety of reformers is the Pope’s push to bring
the ultra-conservative Society of St. Pius X — cast out because it
rejects Vatican II — back into the fold. Benedict lifted the excommunication of its four bishops, including one who denies the Holocaust, as part of unity negotiations.
To Ryan, the Dublin-area priest, the Pope’s reaction is a bit of
a mystery. He knew Benedict in the early 1960s, when the future
pope was a professor of theology named Joseph Ratzinger. A large
black-and-white photograph of a younger Ratzinger — handsome,
with thick hair combed back — hangs framed on Ryan’s living
room wall.
In 1963, a freshly ordained Ryan won a scholarship to the University of Munster in Germany. Ratzinger, who was 36 at the time,
became his academic mentor.
Ratzinger was directly involved in Vatican II, working as theological adviser to Cardinal Josef Frings of Cologne, Germany.
Ryan recalls him flying from council sessions to lectures at Munster, where he would update students on the talks in Rome. For the
young graduate of the Maynooth national seminary near Dublin,
Ratzinger was a revelation.
“At Maynooth the textbooks were 40 years old,” Ryan says. “We
were studying the creation one day and the teacher, the head of
theology, proudly told us he got two paragraphs further in the text
than he did three years before. Can you imagine?
“Then I go to Germany and here’s Ratzinger quoting poetry. It
35
was a joy listening to him. He was brilliant,” Ryan adds, his eyes
brightening.
“The Irish bishops were coming home and saying, ‘People
ought not to be disturbed by the council, we’re spending our time
in prayer.’ But Ratzinger brought Vatican II alive. . . I really felt that
this was the liberation of my kind of priesthood.”
For Ryan, Vatican II pointed the way to “a church that’s closer
to the people; a church with a more human face.” It was a time full
of hope and possibilities.
In 2005, Ratzinger was elected Pope after 24 years as the Vatican’s doctrinal enforcer, heading the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, where he attracted names such as “Cardinal No”
and “God’s Rottweiler.” He called himself Benedict XVI.
Ryan used the occasion to write in an Irish newspaper about
his days with his illustrious mentor. Next thing Ryan knew, he
was invited to Benedict’s exclusive annual gathering of some 40
theologians, most of them former doctoral students of Ratzinger’s.
Ratzinger has been holding the week-long gatherings for years. He
chooses topics of discussion such as Islam and ecumenism. During his pontificate, they were held at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope’s
summer residence.
“In one of the sessions,” Ryans says, “the sex abuse scandals had
just erupted in Ireland and I was saying that the church that got us
here will not be the church to take us where we now want to go. I
feel very strongly about that.”
Ryan made clear that rigid hierarchy preventing lay people
from playing the role Vatican II expects of them was one aspect
that needed changing.
“And (Benedict) kind of corrected me. He said, ‘There are certain things in the church that cannot change!’ Now, I knew that,
but I think he thought I was too radical in saying that,” Ryan says.
Asked in fall of 2012 if he detects a change in Ratzinger’s in36
terpretation of Vatican II from his days as a Munster theologian,
Ryan looked at the portrait of his one-time mentor: “What happens to a man when he gets imprisoned in that Vatican? It must do
something to him.”
37
4
The Second Vatican Council
Pope John XXIII announced his plans for the Second Vatican
Council on Jan. 25, 1959, three months after being elected. Bishops
and cardinals were shocked.
Seventy-five-year-old Angelo Roncalli, the son of a sharecropper, succeeded Pius XII, whose pontificate had lasted 19 years.
Cardinals largely assumed they were electing a transitional pope
who would restrict himself to some tidying up. Besides, Vatican
I had decided in 1870 that popes are infallible. So what was the
point of talking?
The church Pope John inherited was described in a 1906 papal
encyclical as an “unequal society” where “the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to
follow the pastors.” Roncalli understood the world had changed.
There had been two world wars and the horror of the Holocaust. The Cold War threatened nuclear annihilation, modern
science and philosophy challenged church teachings, the sexual
revolution dawned and decolonization opened spiritual markets
beyond the church’s Western base. The church seemed terribly out
of sync.
Pope John wanted the council “to address the whole world and
not just the Catholic faithful,” theologian Lavin writes in her new
book, Vatican II: Fifty Years of Evolution and Revolution in the
Catholic Church. One of its main goals, she adds, was to “work for
a better world and not simply a better church.”
It was the church’s 21st ecumenical council. Previous ones had
been convened to debate and resolve matters of doctrine. Vatican II would instead be “pastoral,” focused on renewing how the
church proclaimed the Gospel — the way mass was celebrated, for
example, and how sacraments like baptism were conducted.
38
The Second Vatican Council in 1962 (Photo: OFF/AFP/Getty Images file photo)
It lasted three years. Sessions were held each fall in St. Peter’s
Basilica, fitted with bleachers to accommodate participants. Pope
John died eight months after it began and his successor, Pope Paul
VI, completed what would eventually redefine the Roman Catholic church.
Two words described the ambitious exercise: the Italian
aggiornamento — updating — was used by Pope John when he
announced the council. It largely meant adapting the church
to modern times. The other, the French ressourcement, meant a
return to the church’s sources, the Gospel and the traditions of the
early church. In other words, council fathers looked forward and
back at the same time.
“This was the genius of the Second Vatican Council,” Lavin
writes. “It moved the church into the modern world by going back
and reminding itself of what the church was in the first place. . .
In this sense, it changed not by presenting new doctrinal teaching,
39
but by modifying its practice and mentality.”
The paradox would eventually develop into today’s deep divisions. During the council, however, extraordinary consensus
emerged around the 16 documents voted. Dissent was restricted to
a small group of archconservatives, including French Archbishop
Marcel Lefebvre, who established the Society of St. Pius X in 1970
and was excommunicated in 1988 along with four bishops he ordained.
“Fortunately, there is no crisis in the church,” Pope Paul told
the Corriere della Sera newspaper as the council ended in December 1965. “Even the formation of two parties — the so-called progressives and non-progressives — is not a sign of disloyalty to the
church. The discussions have all been for the good of the church.
There have been no signs of defections or internal dissension.
The council changed the language of the mass from Latin to
the vernacular. It defined the church as the whole “people of God,”
rather than an institutional hierarchy. It described lay people, for
the first time, as part of the church’s structure and crucial to its survival. It enshrined the principle of “collegiality,” which suggested a
decentralization of power.
The council also paved the way for historic talks with other religions by implying that salvation can be found outside the Roman
Catholic church. It lifted the charge of deicide against the Jews and
firmly deplored “displays of anti-Semitism.”
Finally, it set the stage for a church more engaged in social justice. It denounced war and called for the change of economic systems that benefit the few and leave many in squalor.
“The task of the church is to help to transform these structures
so that all people can live in dignity,” Lavin writes, summarizing
reforms noted in the Vatican II document, Gaudium et Spes. “Some
reforms that could help in eliminating the roots of economic disparity are land reform, co-management, the right of workers to
40
unionize and a just wage for all.”
—
It’s a stretch to see the council’s reforms as radical. But much was
done in the name of “the spirit of Vatican II” — a notion fuelled by
progressive social winds of the time.
Rev. Richard Delahunty, parish priest of Dublin’s Our Lady of
the Assumption, experienced its impact. From 1968 to 2002, he
was a Redemptorist missionary in Brazil, first in the midwestern
and later in the northeastern part of the country.
He arrived the year of the Medellin conference in Colombia,
called by Latin American bishops to discuss Vatican II. Spearheaded by Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara, a key figure at
the council, the conference spoke of a church “listening to the cry
of the poor and becoming the interpreter of their anguish.”
It gave birth to liberation theology, a Marx-inspired movement
that focused on social justice and resulted in some priests backing
revolutionary struggles.
Richard Delahunty (Photo: Sandro Contenta/Toronto Star)
41
Delahunty describes the movement as “linking day-to-day life
with the word of God.” He and his colleagues helped fight land
grabs, organized youth groups and unions, and trained people to
be community leaders.
“Awakening of consciousness used to be a big phrase at the
time,” says Delahunty, a tall, robust 71-year-old with glasses. “It
was about getting people to believe in themselves.”
Brazil’s military dictatorship made that dangerous work. “I
would hear of refrigerated trucks bringing bodies north,” says
Delahunty, who became superior of 40 Redemptorists in Brazil in
1979. A rural guerrilla war was under way and the Redemptorists
would at times hide wanted men. Some priests were accused of being communists, jailed and tortured.
“Sometimes I would have to be aware of what our men were
doing and other times I told them I didn’t want to be aware,” Delahunty says.
In 1972, Pope Paul VI expressed concern about the church Vatican II had unleashed, prompted, church historians believe, by a
curia fearful of losing power. He described the church as wracked
with doubt, dissatisfaction and confrontation.
“Satan’s smoke has made its way into the temple of God through
some crack,” he said in a homily.
By then, reformers who had found common cause during Vatican II had split into factions.
“After the council, the ressourcement people were fearful that
the aggiornamento people were selling out the traditions of the
church,” says American theologian, Charles Curran, adding that
Ratzinger was squarely in the traditionalist camp.
The election of John Paul II in 1978, the most charismatic pope
in modern times, began a steady and firm clampdown on progressives.
On one hand, John Paul II gave full breath to the Second Vati42
can Council’s ecumenical thrust, becoming the first pope, for example, to visit a synagogue. On the other, he centralized power in
Rome and imposed a more conservative church, particularly in
matters of doctrine. Ratzinger was his point man.
Key theologians were disciplined, including Rev. Hans Kung,
a high-profile reformer and Vatican II participant. He rejected
the doctrine of papal infallibility and was banned from teaching
Catholic theology. In 1984, Ratzinger imposed a year of silence on
leading liberation theologian Leonardo Boff, a Franciscan priest
who was also suspended from religious duties. Faced with further
punishment in 1992, Boff left the priesthood. In 1986, Ratzinger
banned Curran from teaching at Catholic universities because of
his contrary views on sexuality, including his rejection of the ban
on contraceptives.
The Vatican mainly reasserted control through the appointment of conservative-minded bishops, who, as Curran puts it,
“never once challenged any church teaching.”
Delahunty saw its effect in Brazil.
“What surprised me was how a group in Rome could be so
negative at times toward a very serious group of bishops in Latin
America in general and in Brazil in particular,” Delahunty says.
“John Paul II, with all his charisma, (had) a kind of suspicion of
what was happening, that it was ‘merely’ social action.”
The activist bishops were not anti-Vatican. Yet, one by one, they
were replaced by people “chosen with obedience to Rome being a
big hallmark,” Delahunty says. The most striking example came in
1985, when, as required by canon law, Camara resigned as archbishop of Recife at the age of 75. He was replaced by Jose Cardoso
Sobrinho, an ultra-conservative accused of eventually dismantling
what had become known as Camara’s “church of the poor.” Some
of the activist work priests were doing stopped.
“The appointment of (Camara’s) successor was a disgrace,”
43
Delahunty says flatly.
In 2009, Sobrinho was widely criticized for excommunicating
a 9-year-old girl who got a legal abortion. She had been raped by
her stepfather. Her mother, who helped the girl, was also excommunicated. Sobrinho described abortion as “a silent Holocaust.”
As Pope, Ratzinger reinforced the conservative momentum. He
eased restrictions against celebrating mass in Latin, ushering in
the return of a Good Friday prayer that calls for the conversion of
Jews.
In 2009, he lifted the excommunication of bishops with the Society of St. Pius X, which continues to hold Jews responsible for the
killing of Christ. Days later, one of them, the Briton Richard Williamson, publicly denied the existence of the gas chambers used in
the Holocaust. The outrage that followed forced Benedict to admit
that progressives in the church were now in open revolt.
“Some groups,” he lamented in a letter to bishops, “openly accused the Pope of wanting to turn back the clock to before the
(Second Vatican) Council: as a result, an avalanche of protests was
unleashed, whose bitterness laid bare wounds deeper than those of
the present moment.”
The then-pope added that the Society of St. Pius X must accept
Vatican II if it hoped to return to the church. But he rejected any
interpretation of the council as a break with the past.
“Some of those who put themselves forward as great defenders
of the council also need to be reminded that Vatican II embraces
the entire doctrinal history of the church,” he wrote. “Anyone who
wishes to be obedient to the council has to accept the faith professed over the centuries, and cannot sever the roots from which
the tree draws its life.”
44
5
Losing the Battle of the Faithful
in Ireland
Rev. Gilles Routhier, a theologian at Laval University and an expert on Vatican II, argues that behind Benedict’s effort to avoid
a schism with the society is this Vatican calculation: “Liberal Catholicism is in any event a lost cause. It’s a Catholicism that no longer attracts vocations; it’s a Catholicism that’s losing speed, that no
longer has people practising. . . Vocations are found in a more demanding Catholicism, a fundamentalist one. Therefore, we don’t
sacrifice much by sacrificing these progressive eccentrics.”
It’s a calculation Routhier rejects, insisting it’s opposed to a central theme of Vatican II — adapting the church to modern times.
“When confronted with changing times, the temptation of all
religions is to retrench and reconstitute themselves as groups opposing that culture,” Routhier argues. “The danger for the Catholic
Church is that it marginalizes itself and simply becomes sectarian.”
What’s clear is that Benedict believed during his papacy that a
good dose of doctrinal discipline was required.
When the sex abuse scandals erupted in Ireland, he wrote an
open letter to Irish Catholics that partly blamed pedophile priests
on council reforms being “misinterpreted.” He said penalties under canon law were avoided and priests adopted “ways of thinking
and assessing secular realities without sufficient reference to the
gospel.”
That, too, scandalized reformers.
Nowhere is the battle and crisis more apparent than in Ireland.
Nowhere has the church fallen so much, so fast.
“The church has lost the confidence of its own members,” says
Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, who compares the scale
45
of change to Quebecers turning away en masse from the church
during the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s. In the 2011 census, 84
per cent of Ireland’s 4.5 million people described themselves as
Catholic. In the 1960s, almost all Catholics went to mass. In June,
a survey found 34 per cent of Catholics say they attend mass once
a week. In Dublin, the archdiocese says 14 per cent attend a service on the weekend. In some parishes it’s 2 per cent, and most are
elderly. Collections are at a trickle and church maintenance costs
are rising.
In different studies, Dublin sociologists Betty Hilliard and Tom
Inglis have argued that the change began with women regaining
control of their sexuality. During the 1970s, mothers began urging daughters to choose education over uncontrolled fertility. And
they stopped pushing children toward religious vocations.
Globalization and economic growth further changed attitudes.
Then came the most devastating blow: since 2005, four government inquiries have revealed extensive sex abuse of children by
priests over a 60-year period, and shocking cases of indifference or
cover-up by church authorities.
In the Dublin archdiocese, 98 priests have been accused of sexual abuse. Ten of them have been convicted in court. So far, 199
civil suits have been launched. They cost the diocese 10.3 million
euros in settlements and 4.9 million euros in legal fees.
The 2011 Cloyne report revealed a secret letter from the Vatican which, the report said, “effectively gave Irish bishops the freedom to ignore” sex abuse guidelines drafted in 1996. The letter
sternly warned that the obligation to report abuse to civil authorities might violate canon law.
Shortly after the report’s release, Prime Minister Enda Kenny
rose in the Irish parliament to denounce a Vatican culture dominated by “disconnection, elitism (and) narcissism.”
The state itself, however, is not blameless.
46
Colm O’Gorman was sexually abused by a priest for 2 ½ years,
beginning when he was 14. “It made me feel that everything I was
told about the world was a lie,” he says. He left home and slept on
the streets before picking himself up and founding One in Four, an
agency that supports victims of sexual abuse.
Colm O’Gorman (Photo: Sandro Contenta/Toronto Star)
In 1995, he went to police with accusations against his abuser,
Rev. Sean Fortune. Other victims came forward, and the priest
committed suicide in the first week of his trial. The case resulted
in the first government inquiry into clerical sex abuse. O’Gorman
sued the pope and won a 300,000-euro settlement.
Today, O’Gorman heads the Irish branch of Amnesty International. In 2011 it issued a 430-page report, “In Plain Sight,” detailing not only the church’s responsibility, but also how the state
failed to investigate and prosecute allegations of sex abuse against
children.
47
“We weren’t a country that questioned power,” O’Gorman says.
“The authority the church had in Ireland was an authority granted
by us, and those who came before us. We handed that over and we
need to reclaim that.”
A notorious serial abuser was Rev. Tony Walsh, a popular Elvis impersonator dubbed “the singing priest.” Allegations against
him began when he was in the seminary. In 1978, the year he was
ordained, he was posted at Our Lady of the Assumption, which
Delahunty now runs in Ballyfermot, a Dublin neighbourhood
where people struggle with unemployment and crime.
The church was built of cement blocks along a traffic circle in
1953. Its rafters are exposed and it would feel a bit like a hangar
were it not for a ceiling painted blue and walls a warm red.
Walsh would abuse children next to the altar, where there now
hangs a long banner with words of Jesus: “Love one another just as
I have loved you.” Within months of his arrival, a complaint that he
sexually abused a child reached the archbishop’s office.
By 1985, seven priests, as well as an archbishop and bishop,
knew of sex abuse allegations against Walsh. When church authorities investigated, Walsh admitted to abusing three children. Yet he
was transferred to another parish “to avoid further scandal,” a government report says. He left with an archbishop’s letter: “I take this
opportunity to thank you for your dedicated work in Ballyfermot.”
His housekeeper at the new parish told church authorities of
boys sleeping overnight in his room, of condoms and syringes
found there, and of Walsh “using” her underwear.
He was sent to counselling in 1988 and was finally thrown out
of the priesthood in 1996. A government inquiry said it knew of 40
people who had complained of child sexual abuse by Walsh. “He
has admitted to using children for sexual gratification once a fortnight over an eight-year period,” it concluded. In 2010, Walsh was
convicted and sentenced to 16 years in prison for sexually abusing
48
three boys.
Not surprisingly, attendance at Our Lady of the Assumption
has suffered. Before the sex abuse became widely known, its 1,600
seats were packed. On a recent Sunday, about 150 people were at
the 11 a.m. service, most of them with grey or white hair.
Hoban, the co-founder of the reform group of priests, insists
the sex abuse would have been sharply reduced, if not eliminated,
if Vatican II had been implemented.
“A key part of Vatican II was that the church of the future was
a people’s church,” he says. “The people are the church and the
structures should give life to that theory.
“Decisions should not be made by a group of celibate men in
Rome but by people representative of the church right across the
board, including lay people.”
If mothers and fathers were included in decisions about clerical
sex abuse, Hoban adds, you can bet those priests would not have
been transferred to other parishes, where they preyed on more
children.
Archbishop Martin is widely credited with bringing a different
tone to the church hierarchy. He handed over 60,000 documents
from the diocese to a government inquiry and held a service of
atonement, where he washed the feet of sex abuse victims.
Still, all priests are paying a price. Wearing a Roman collar in
public has become a test of courage, if not a test of faith. Even an
elderly priest like Seamus Ryan isn’t spared. One day, he hurried
out of his Dublin parish, also in Ballyfermot, to reach the post office before it closed.
“You see, I had my collar on because I just rushed out with my
letter,” he says. “These three fellas come up against me on the street
and one of them says, at the top of his voice, ‘Oh, another effing
pedophile.’
“My instinct was to say, ‘Do you really know me?’ But it was a
49
bit fearsome because these big fellows could just whack you. So I
didn’t say anything.”
Another day, Ryan found himself in the lobby of a hotel.
“I was going to the toilet and this boy was going to the toilet,
too,” he says. “And his mother saw me and she raced after her son
and pulled him back. Oh God — you feel so terrible. Honest to
God that was awful. I’ll never forget that.”
Jane Mellett, a pastoral worker at Our Lady of the Assumption
parish, hesitates to even admit she’s connected to the church. “I’m
out at a pub chatting with someone and I’m thinking, ‘Please don’t
ask me what I do,’” says Mellett, 33, who says she cherishes the
church’s social work with the poor and would have happily become a priest years ago if the church allowed it.
“A lot of my friends think I’m half-cracked,” she says, referring
to her work and strong Catholic belief. “I’ve got a friend who wears
a T-shirt that says, ‘So many Christians, so few lions.’ It really annoys me. When he wears it I’m, like, ‘You wouldn’t wear it if it said
Jews or Muslims.’”
Hoban puts it bluntly: “Priests have become almost demonized
in Ireland.”
Hoban’s parish of St. Cormac’s is in Moygownagh, a rural community of 150 homes in western Ireland. The name in Gaelic
means “the plain of the cows.”
The only pub, grocery store and post office are all in the same
building, outside of which are two gas pumps. There were splashes
of excitement in September, with red and green flags noting County Mayo’s first appearance in 60 years in the all-Ireland Gaelic football final. But young people are moving to the city and the place
is slowly dying. One primary school is set to close; the remaining
one has 55 children.
Hoban lives in a comfortable church-owned Victorian home on
three hectares of land. He thought at one point it could have been
50
sold to pay for the 300,000 euros needed to restore his parish. Hoban is 64 and won’t likely be replaced when he retires. Parishioners
know it. They admire his passion for reform, and if it breathes new
life into the parish, all the better.
—
The average age of Ireland’s 4,500 priests is 64. Retirement age for
priests is 75. Last year, six men were ordained. This year, 12 seminarians began their studies at Ireland’s national seminary, St. Patrick’s College Maynooth. It has a total of 64 seminarians.
In Hoban’s diocese of Killala, 30 priests work in 22 parishes.
In 20 years it’s expected there will be eight. At what stage, Hoban
wonders, will there be no priests left in Ireland to celebrate mass?
Is it sensible, then, that in one western parish seven priests
have been banned from practicing because they’re married, Hoban asks. Particularly since the Vatican allows married Anglican
priests to become Catholic priests.
Likewise, the ordination of women and the dumping of celibacy
becomes a matter of church survival, Hoban argues. Still, those reforms are not included in the Association of Catholic Priests’ manifesto, which simply calls for a “re-evaluation of Catholic sexual
teaching” in ways that reflect the experience of ordinary people.
“We’re not going to give people sticks to beat us up with,” says
Hoban, sitting in his sunny living room.
Five priests in the association have already been silenced by the
Vatican or told to submit all writings to Rome for approval. The
Vatican ordered the association’s co-founder, Rev. Tony Flannery,
to stop writing a monthly magazine column, apparently because
of his views on contraception, celibacy and women’s ordination. It
advised him to go to a monastery for prayer and reflection.
At what Dubliners call the archbishop’s “palace,” Martin says
the Irish church is in the middle of a “culture war.” The Associa51
tion of Catholic Priests, he says, is a voice among others on the
battlefield.
“I celebrated a mass on Sunday for the Latin rite traditionalists
— it’s another world. But they have more people coming to mass;
they have 500 every Sunday,” he says.
“We need areas of dialogue, but it would still be difficult,” he
adds. “The people I was with on Sunday — put them together with
the Association of Catholic Priests (and) I don’t know who would
win the battle but there would be a battle.”
He agrees that a more decentralized church would have made
it more difficult for child abusers to continue operating. But talk
of different power structures isn’t enough. He says the question to
ask is, “What sort of church is compatible with the change in Irish
society?” And the answer must have limits.
“In the Catholic Church, it isn’t that everything goes,” he says.
“You can’t just make up your own church. We don’t own the faith; I
don’t as a bishop, nor does the pope. Faith is a gift, and we receive
the gift. But I don’t receive it just for my own interpretation.”
The key is to reach out to young people, Martin says, and confront the fact the church is no longer transmitting the faith. “Young
people come out of Catholic schools and they don’t know the Our
Father,” he complains.
“What I want to see is a faith formation that treats people as
adults, that helps them live their faith in the adult world,” Martin
adds, describing a Catholicism that inspires in the home and at
the office. “Your faith isn’t about what you do on Sunday.” Hoban
believes that kind of Catholicism must respond to what Pope John
XXIII, citing Jesus, called the “signs of the times.”
A survey last year commissioned by his association found that
87 per cent of Irish Catholics disagreed with the church’s ban on
married priests, 77 per cent thought women should be ordained,
and 60 per cent disagreed with church teachings that gay relation52
ships are immoral.
“My predecessors used to tell people how to vote,” Hoban says.
“Now people are much more educated than priests.”
“The Second Vatican Council was not the reason I went to
Maynooth,” he adds, referring to the Dublin-area seminary, “but
it is the reason I stayed.
“My generation feels betrayed,” Hoban says. “I feel we have
been sold a dummy. We were told, ‘This is what the church would
be,’ and then it was blocked.”
53
SANDRO CONTENTA is a feature writer at the Toronto Star. He
joined the paper in 1981 and spent nine years as a foreign correspondent, reporting from the Middle East and Europe. He covered the second Palestinian intifada, as well as conflicts in Kosovo,
Iraq and Lebanon and revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Tunisia and
Egypt. A former education beat reporter, Contenta is the author of
the book Rituals of Failure: What Schools Really Teach. His previous
StarDispatches eRead is entitled “Linda’s Story: An Investigation
into the Mysterious World of Amnesia.” His work has been nominated for four National Newspaper Awards.
© 2013 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
All rights reserved. Published in Canada by
Toronto Star Newspapers Limited
under the imprint StarDispatches.
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Editor: Michael Cooke
StarDispatches:
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Creative Director: Nuri Ducassi
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Sex, Scandal and Secularism:
The Catholic Church in Crisis
ISBN: ePub3 978-0-88785-589-4
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Cover photo: Dreamstime Photo Illustration
Chapters 3-5 were originally published by
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updated for this publication.
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Sex, Scandal and Secularism

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