How is a bishop's duty of care to a victim of clerical child sex abuse to be reconciled with his undivided and unaccountable power as an administrator?

"Where Christian charity, humanity and the love of Christ were called for, Peter encountered a litigious response, denial of liability, bare faced lies and was threatened with being sued for libel and legal costs."  (Mary McCloskey, April 17th)

(For the whole of this April 17th statement of Mrs Mary McCloskey on Peter's death, click this link.)

We believe that this tragic case highlights an issue that is at the heart of the current crisis in our church.  This is the apparently insuperable difficulty of reconciling the pastoral role of a bishop - his duty of care for every member of his flock - with his role as chief administrator of the diocese.     

Bishop Donal Murray announced on April 28th that his doctor had advised him to take a break.  We can be sure this means that the bishop feels under acute strain at this time.  That strain is almost certainly related to these separate obligations that all too often seem to come into conflict. 

In our prayers for the McCloskey family we must include Bishop Murray as well.

If the diocese withheld information requested by Peter McCloskey, and then threatened Peter with legal action in order to minimise the legal and financial consequences of its original mistake, the fault was not simply Bishop Murray's.  It lies at the door of the Irish bishops collectively - for apparently adopting, as a matter of policy, an adversarial legal stance towards Catholic victims, in order to minimise whatever legal penalties and whatever financial settlement, will lie at the end of the process.

How can the interests of the church - primarily a spiritual entity whose purpose is to care and to heal - be said to be in any way incompatible with, and totally distinct from, the healing of victims - a spiritual priority?  How does it come about that, in far too many cases, as soon as a complaint is made, the complainant can be treated as though no longer a vital member of the body of Christ?  Is the complainant's baptism somehow cancelled and nullified at that point - so that he or she is effectively excommunicated, held to stand outside the church, as an enemy to it?

The shock of this event should wake everyone up to the fact that what was damaging to Peter McCloskey about the clerical sexual abuse, and then the administrative abuse, he suffered, was equally damaging to the whole Irish church, and especially to the church in Limerick diocese. 

Our church will survive the loss of every material object it owns, down to the last votive candle - and remain strong if it retains no more than its cornerstone - its faith in its Lord.  But it could lose that cornerstone if our bishops' cornerstone is something else:  the material wealth the church has accumulated down the centuries, and their own undivided power.  Have they become so attached to this material backdrop to their own ministry - and to this unaccountable power -  that they have misidentified these things as the foundation of the Church - the possessions they must protect at any cost?

How often down the years have we heard Sunday sermons about 'materialism'?  How often have we been warned that when we go to meet our maker we will take nothing with us but the state of our souls?

Won't the same apply to ecclesiastical materialism and privilege?  Won't our bishops be asked not for an audit of the material possessions of the diocese at their deaths, but for an account of their own integrity and of the degree to which that integrity has reinforced - or weakened - the faith and spirituality of their flock?

We believe that bishops do NOT have to choose between the interests of victims and the interests of the church - because the most fundamental interests of the church are inseparable from the interests of victims.   They are the lost sheep - the ones that bishops must prioritise as Jesus would have done. 

The choice that our bishops truly must make is between a materialistic interpretation of the interests of the church, and a spiritual interpretation.  Is the church in essence a spiritual or a material entity?  Bishop Murray is far too good a theologian to be in any danger of giving the wrong answer to that question. 

It is now time for him and his fellow bishops to realise that if in their treatment of Catholic victims of clerical abuse they add further injury, for whatever reason, this is a further abuse of the whole church as well, and an even deadlier assault upon the faith they were ordained to serve.  It needs to be identified for what it is - administrative abuse.

And if, as now seems incontrovertible, the pastoral and administrative responsibilities of bishops are irreconcilable, hasn't the time come for bishops to decide which of these roles is essential to their office?  And to prefer the pastoring role, handing over administrative responsibility to a council or committee that involves representative laity? This would require radical change throughout the global church, but the situation is so grave that we now need to think in terms of radical solutions. 

Too many victims of clerical sexual abuse have then suffered additional devastating clerical administrative abuse for us to have any confidence in the present system of undivided episcopal power.  Our bishops need to choose between power and service, and to reflect on the choice of their master.