DUBLIN (IRELAND)
RTÉ
March 12, 2018
Sean, look, 1988, when John Paul wrote a letter, Mulieris Dignitatem, in which he set out the reasons why women couldn’t be ordained. That was 1988. And I wrote to the Pope at the time and said, look, I have great difficulty, I can’t believe this, I can’t accept it, I can’t teach my children it. I don’t want to be out of communion with my church – tell me, am I out of communion with my church? And he wrote back, through an intermediary, of course, saying, absolutely not, that’s fine, you know. And I accept, I absolutely accept the authority of the Pope. Do I believe absolutely everything the Pope says? I don’t have to, no, because only very occasionally does he speak with what we call infallible authority; a lot of the time he doesn’t. Let me just take very recently, a month ago he spoke in Chile, to victims of sexual abuse, and what he said was dreadful, hurtful, and also deeply inaccurate, very flawed. Do I have to accept that? Of course I don’t. I’m perfectly correct to say that that was hurtful to a lot of people. He himself had to apologise.
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They are legion; they are legion, the silent sufferers. And they carry it with them through their lives and it remains unresolved and it causes dysfunction and it causes difficulties, and we know that story, because it’s the story of Ryan, of Murphy, of Cloyne, of Hart, of all these [reports]. And the sad thing for me is, that here we are, you know, and it’s 20 years after the new Guidelines were introduced and everything, and we were supposed to have diocesan audits, and we were supposed to be told, all the secrets were supposed to be out there, there were supposed to be no more secrets, and yet here we are, and there is a mountain of them, and a mountain of hurt.
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