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	So What Was I Going to Say That Was So Inappropriate? By Colm O'Gorman ColmogormanDotCom September 27, 2009 http://colmogorman.com/?p=510 This week I had the unique experience of being "uninvited" from taking part in a Mass of Healing and Reconciliation planned by Fr Iggy O'Donovan at the Augustinian Church in Drogheda. It seems the Archdiocese of Armagh, led by Cardinal Sean Brady, believes there was something "inappropriate" about the invitation and instructed Fr O'Donovan to withdraw it. It's a real shame. A shame that senior Church leaders have chosen to close their hearts, their minds and their ears to words offered in a true spirit of hope. Hope informed by an absolute belief in the endless possibilities to be found in our human capacity to transcend terrible trauma and find a way forward together. But there it is. They have refused. They have used their power to prevent such a process from finding even more powerful expression by locating it in Church. As things have worked out though it would appear that the Archdiocese has shot itself in the foot once again. What would have been a quiet, if significant moment, for a few hundred people max in Drogheda has turned into somehting much bigger. Four days of media reports of their instruction to "uninvite" me has simply left them looking foolish and meant that many more people are interested in what I might have said. I have had a few requests from media to give them the text of what I planned to say. So what are the words I would have spoken that they deem, without any inquiry, to be inappropriate? As it happens, I didn't have a text prepared. I prefer to speak without a pre-prepared text as it allows me to engage more with the group I am speaking to in the moment, rather than deliver something I decided would suit before even meeting them. I of course had a clear sense of what I wanted to say, but wanted to do that in a spontaneous, rather than in a prepared way. So I sat down and wrote it out. The Irish Times ran bits of it, and earlier today I recorded it for the This Week show for RTE Radio 1. It will go out tomorrow between 1 and 2pm, ironically enough at the same time as the service in the Augustinian Church in Drogheda. Anyway, here it is, the words Cardinal Brady and Bishop Clifford feared and believed would be somehow "inappropriate": I am not here today to rake over old, established hurts. Instead I want to speak about my sense of an immense opportunity for us all, that having named and to a large part owned the truth of the terrible crimes inflicted upon children within church, we might now find a way forward together in a new spirit of truth, compassion, understanding and love. That this might happen within Church here today has I think particular power. If we can come together in the very place where such hurt has in the past been hidden and denied then we really can model something new, something renewed within ourselves; the courage to listen to difficult truths, to learn and to move forward together. We will have conquered fear and refused to be held back by those who remain trapped in their own fear and denial. We know the harm done. We know the price of our failures to address terrible wrongs and we know we must change the way we work as a society to confront such abuses in the future, to become the kind of society we aspire to be. Perhaps we still fear change? But what would it be like if we were to change? What would that demand of us, and what would it mean for us? We are so frightened of seeing the darkness in our collective humanity that we fail to embrace the light that exists in at least equal measure there; the profound beauty in our own humanity that can respond with truth and courage to the things we see and do that are simply wrong. We are so frightened of acknowledging the awful things done to others by people close to us, people we love and even by ourselves that we end up though our denial allowing such things to happen. In our silence we collude, in our denial we facilitate. What we have yet to understand is that we can only be enriched if we have the courage and compassion, the humanity and integrity to name injustice wherever we see it, especially when we are party to causing injustice ourselves. I believe in the power of truth. Naming the truth in difficult circumstances is always the right thing to do. If we have the courage to hear and accept the truth of who we are and what we have done, to face it and own it, and to find a way forward from that place, then we can change the world. Truth used like that challenges us to face the worst of who we can be, but also to discover the best of who we are. So often, we run from things we have done that we feel mark us as bad. I know that feeling; for so many years I ran from my own feelings of shame and self-blame. I ran from the abuse, my memories of it, my physical reactions to it and my powerlessness to prevent it. I believed that these shameful, awful experiences named the truth of who I was. But they don't. The truth of who I am is to be found in the way I responded to the events that I have experienced. How I chose to deal with them, once I was free to do so. And the same is true for us all. We can run from the past, deny our responsibility for it, we can blame, judge and hate others, if we choose to. Or we can turn and face it, learn from it and move forward together. We now know what happened within our church and our society. What matters now is how we respond to it, that we find the capacity to learn and change, the compassion to understand the hurts we each experienced and the love to move forward together. Facing this dark part of our history has been painful in so many ways. But in facing it together we now have the opportunity to discover who we are as a society. We have the chance to show that we have the courage, the integrity and the humanity to work through and past our shared hurt, our failures, our anger and our disappointment, and to become the best of who we can be. In facing our collective darkness we will discover our collective humanity. Surely we owe each other that? From the first letter of St. John: Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.
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