Seán Ó Conaill: The Church Needs a Whistle Blower’s Charter
“The question has to be asked as to why what is best, what demands hard work, is not the calling of every single person who takes on the job of service to Ireland. Worse still is the question of how it is that decent people, of whom Maurice McCabe emerges as a paradigm, are so shamefully treated when rightly they demand that we do better.”
This is the conclusion of the Afterword to the Third Interim Report of the Disclosures Tribunal in 2017, set up under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 – Ireland’s ‘whistle blowers’ charter’. Maurice McCabe, honest Garda, had been driven close to suicide by vindictive briefing against him not just by colleagues but by superiors in the Garda service – but this Third Interim Report was his vindication.
Eight years earlier, in December 2009, in the wake of the Murphy report, the Irish Bishops Conference had described the culture of the Dublin archdiocese before 1994 as one of ‘cover up’ – in which ‘the avoidance of scandal, the preservation of the reputations of individuals and of the Church, took precedence over the safety and welfare of children.’
No bishop had ever blown a whistle on this culture – regretted by Bishop Jim Moriarty of Kildare and Leighlin (a former Dublin auxiliary) in a resignation letter in November 2009. However, sixteen years later the significance of this failure has still to impact fully upon the discourse of the church. What was it about the culture of the Catholic church that had made whistle blowing against starkly obvious internal evils – revealed also by the May 2009 Ryan report on abuse within Irish church-run residential institutions – impossible for bishops, those charged especially to teach, to rule and to sanctify?
Maurice McCabe’s ordeal as a whistle-blower – the loss of his career within the Garda and the malicious blowback that saw him taken to the brink – gives us part of the answer. Our very basic need to belong will engender deep dread of being cast out instead, and misrepresented – if, in a crisis of conscience, we do not simply comply with the culture – the ‘customary procedures’ – of the colleagues we have chosen to join.
But this is only part of the answer – for the culture of the Catholic church, and of any Christian church, should surely be determined by the story told in the Gospel.
‘Alas for you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut up the kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces, neither going in yourselves nor allowing others to go who want to.’
This is Jesus of Nazareth – whistle blower extraordinary – in full flow (Matt 23). He goes even further elsewhere in targeting shepherds who do not care for their sheep (John 10). Freed from all historical overlay his story is that of a man very like Maurice McCabe, ‘briefed against’ as a blasphemer for telling the truth about the religious culture of his own time, a culture that was deeply unjust to the poorest and oblivious of its own self-regard.
That this Gospel story became submerged over the centuries by a different story – of insulted divine ‘honour’ in need of ‘satisfaction’ for the sexual sins of the people – is also part of the problem of Catholic supineness in the face of evil. It concealed the story of Jesus the whistle blower – who was vindicated by God himself for whistle blowing – behind a medieval yarn of Jesus sent by the Father to suffer crucifixion to placate himself – and made this nonsensical narrative the central story that the church defends. It also justified the confusion and conflation of Christian obedience with obedience to a religious superior. The loss of that distinction was also part of the church culture that tolerated and concealed clerical abuse of children – and turned any thought of whistle blowing in the church into disobedience and disloyalty.
Directly as a result of the clerical abuse scandals there is now one area of ‘protected disclosure’ in the church in Ireland – disclosure related to sexual abuse of children and others by any church servant. This is clear confirmation that obedience to God must be understood as something different from obedience to a religious superior – and that to equate the two is a mistake. That principle of protected disclosure must therefore logically be extended to any other form of abuse of office, or of justice, in the church.
The Vatican visitation of the Irish church that occurred in the wake of the Ryan and Murphy reports in 2009 was just such an abuse. It never sought to expose the underlying causes of those disasters and never admitted any problem of confusion over Christian obedience – plainly visible in both the Ryan and Murphy reports. Conducted by bishops, it farcically never even addressed the anomaly of blanket silence on the part of other bishops, in the face of what are now admitted to have been intolerable evils. Instead, the Vatican then sought – and found – scapegoats among those priests in Ireland who had protested most strongly against injustice to children, families, women and the LGBT+ minority in Ireland. The visitation and its sequel was therefore itself another church scandal, to add to those that had gone before – the Vatican version of ‘blowback’ against honest whistle blowing.
When will Ireland’s honest Catholic priests receive the vindication that Maurice McCabe received from the Protected Disclosures Tribunal, set up under the Protected Disclosures Act of 2014? And when will all who try to serve others honestly, in any setting, hear from their pastors a theology of atonement that assures them of the support of the Trinity for all honest whistle blowers – inside or outside the church – especially in any crisis of conscience that threatens them with ‘blowback’?
Through belief in the Resurrection of Jesus the earliest Christians received assurance that they did not need to fear the blowback of the imperial culture of their own time, and that a new age had begun. That the church itself later became an imperium – remaking the story of redemption to justify an elitist ecclesiastical pyramid – is the background origin of the disaster of the cover-up of clerical child abuse by the church’s highest officials. It has taken the exposure of this anomaly – beginning not at the summit but at and beyond the periphery of the church – to reveal the summit’s inadequacy, but this has still to be admitted. When all honest whistle blowers have been officially vindicated, and the need for their witness admitted, the authority of the magisterium can recover. For many that authority lies still in abeyance – suspended by the distrust and disappointment that the silence of bishops in the face of deep internal evils has caused.