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	Clerical Abuse Issue Is Everybody's Problem Former Lecturer in Bahavioural Science in the Institute of Technology, Tralee, Fr Gearóid Ó Donnchadha Phd Gives a Sociological View of the Prevalence of Child Abuse in Religious Institutions The Kerryman June 10, 2009 http://www.kerryman.ie/lifestyle/clerical-abuse-issue-is-everybodys-problem-1767974.html IN 1795 the British government established Maynooth College for the training of Irish priests for Ireland. Their purpose was to prevent candidates for Irish diocese going to European colleges for training. Europe, especially France, was under the influence of republicanism, particularly following the French revolution of 1789. This revolution caused a huge migration of catholic clergy from France to Britain. Britain was embarrassed by their presence and found use for many of them by having them appointed to the faculty of Maynooth. So Maynooth, at first, was staffed largely by French priests and they set the agenda for the Irish church of the subsequent two centuries. There was a major problem with these French priests: their theology was tainted with Jansenism— a form of Calvinism. Whatever good points Calvinism may have, it has one serious flaw: the doctrine of predestination, the belief that before one is born God has decided that some would be saved and enjoy heaven for all eternity, while the others, the vast majority, would spend eternity in hell fire. No effort of the individual can alter God's prejudgement. There is a basis for this belief in the writings of Augustine. (Another legacy of Augustine is the doctrine of original sin and the lately discredited doctrine of Limbo which sees innocent children and the vast majority of the world's people excluded from the happiness of heaven because they do not have access to baptism). The uncertainty of one's place in the lottery caused great anxiety to the Calvinists. How was one to know if one was one of the elect or one of the massa damnata? The answer advanced was that if one were of the elect. one would enjoy God's favour in this life as well as in the next. So, to allay their anxiety, Calvinists (and, indeed, other Protestants) worked hard and lived abstemiously to ensure prosperity and the certainty that they were of the elect. This cultural belief is called the Protestant ethic and is credited with launching the industrial revolution. The obverse of the belief that those who prospered were of the elect was that the poor, the feckless and the disadvantaged were of the damned, enemies of God and deserving to be treated as such. Prison sentences for homelessness, vagrancy and debt are a result of this attitude. One does not wish to blame everything on Calvinism but that attitude was allied with racism and male chauvinism and allowed the near extermination of the native American population and the enslavement of nations in the British empire. There was also a concentration on the condemnation of sexual 'sin' and the branding as illegitimate those who were conceived in such sin. The majority of Irish priests came from the strong farmer and merchant classes and later, in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, from the professional classes including teachers. From these classes too came the religious brothers and nuns. These classes, in general, were upwardly mobile and intolerant of the poor, the traveller and the smallholder whose land they took at every opportunity. What many people are still slow to recognise is that most evictions were made possible by the willingness of the large farmer to take over land from which the small farmer had been evicted. So we have the better off Irish population after the early eighteen hundreds who were imbued with two conflicting value systems: the basic traditional Christianity of love and equality and the new authoritarian, intolerant, Jansenistic bourgeois approach of many of the new class of clergy. The upwardly mobile people and the new class of priest suited one another and built a culture that had much to recommend it but was flawed at its core. This led to many men and women dedicating themselves to the following of Christ in the secular clergy or in religious orders. Most of them did good work in the main and were examples of dedication to helping others, but there was an underlying intolerance for weakness and sin. We must emphasise that on joining a religious order or the secular clergy, the man or woman retained the flawed values of the Maynooth dominated church. When we find instances of physical abuse of a child who, in the eyes of the abuser, is the product of poverty, failure and sin we look for the fundamental cause, not in the individual abuser, not in the religious order, but in the society and the value system that created both. I speak here of physical violence. Some sexual abuse may be seen as a degradation and punishment and yields to the same explanation as does physical abuse. Some behaviour, however, seems to be of a more sinister, psychotic character that we cannot deal with here. However, the cover up of such instances where known and the transfer of predators to new fields of opportunity was a result of the same damaged value system we have been examining which dictated as a priority that respectability and good name be maintained. There is much discussion as to who should pay compensation. We all should because, much as some would like to distance themselves from the perpetrators of abuse, they are of us and of our value system; It is time to look forward as well as backward, time to examine our value system and amend it, not throw out the baby with the bath water.
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