Unforgivable: Pope Francis and the Impossible Request.

When I was a teenager and harbouring dreams of one day being a ‘proper writer’, I promised myself that the one thing I absolutely never ever would do as an Irish woman would be write about the Church, State, sex or death.  And yet, here we are, the Pope has come to Ireland for the first time since my infancy, and somehow, there are no other words in my heart or of my soul worth saying.

In part, they are words for the me of what seems a thousand lifetimes ago: words for when I was maybe 8, maybe 9, visiting Mother Brendan in the convent, sitting in front of the still dancing air of the Holy Tabernacle, repeating silently over and over, “only say the word and I shall be healed”, and learning in some deep and true way what it was to meet stillness, presence and a sense of wholeness. I didn’t know then how those very words would later become noose and torment, an anxious ritual to stave off death and disgust, disappointment and disintegration.

Nowadays I call the intense religious rituals that would come to dominate my childhood “Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” – the way I tapped my shoulders evenly to please the Angels, the endless Rosary recitations, all that running fitfully back and forth, over and back, between the kitchen and my bedroom in hopeful, endless eyelash pulling sequences, magical communications with my Guardian angel begging it to release me from the constant sense I was destined for the pit of hell for my impurity, but at the time, I guess it was distraction. At the time, it was the only way I knew to survive an ever creeping sense of evil and of doom.

The funny thing is, though, madness can only ever really be considered as such when everyone around you isn’t doing it along with you.  While as an adult it would widen my UK psychiatrist’s eyes to hear of the intensity and frequency of my childhood rituals, the truth is that then, in Catholic Ireland, I was not at all alone in believing my thoughts were important and dangerous not only to my living body, but my immortal soul.   

After all, I grew up in a place where our teachers took us on a bus once to see if a stone statue would cry. When I was about eight, a group of kids in my grandmother’s neighbourhood and I sat for six hours in front of the Virgin Mary wishing she might shed some saltwater, or, if we were really lucky, maybe a bit of blood. When I returned after a break for lunch one day, some of the others regaled me with a story about how I had just missed Jesus Himself descending from the plinth to do… the Shake and Vac.

Then there was the religious aunt who, ahead of my own first Holy Communion, told me of the young girl who had had an impure thought during the Sacrament, transmuting the communion flesh into real live flesh and blood, “teaching her a lesson she’d never forget”. Another aunt routinely wrote to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who, of course, helpfully wrote back letters we sometimes had read to us at the dinner table. Mainly about abortion, of course. I was ten when, in the back of my grandfather’s chemist shop, I was given a book of aborted foetuses to look at and pray over, right next to some old school jars of formaldehyde.

Of course, this is not to say that everyone back then grew up with the constant irritating jingle of “Only say the word and you shall be healed” buzzing in their brain like a constant low drone. My internal compulsions, particularly when things got heated in my (stereotypically Irish) alcoholic home or when I was being stoned by the neighbourhood kids (yes, that was a thing), could be pretty noisy. Even when I was a kid I kind of knew I relied on them too much for comfort and, even as a kid, could see they didn’t stop the drinking, the roaring, the stoning, or the darker wordless nights when I would pray I could merge with the Infant of Prague and become cool smooth stone, just to stop the pain of entering Hell.

The years between then and now shimmer like the mirage on some dusty Summer’s country road, and in the interim,  both Ireland and I have learned to live differently.

Yet, try as we might, none of us can fully escape our learning histories, and if I have learned anything from living with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, religious scrupulosity and being Irish,  it’s that only saying the word doesn’t heal a damned thing.

Words alone do not heal. Words alone do not exorcise demons.

Speaking on Newstalk ahead of the Pope’s visit to Ireland for the World Meeting of Families, industrial school survivor Michael O’Brien, who was raped and beaten as a child by clerics, makes this clear. “Tis easy apologise”, he says, “we want action. We want [Pope Francis] to come out and  say “I’m going to do something about this, and this is what I’m going to do. I’m going to call in every Bishop from around the world and say to them, if you know of a priest that committed the crime of sexual abuse,  and it is a crime, you take his name and you.. have him arrested.. and he will be taken to court.. and he will be punished. There is nobody being punished for this. Nobody.  I am one of the oldest survivors left. I’m 85 years now. I want peace and closure before I do. Because the only time I will get peace is when they put me in the coffin and.. bury me”.

What Pope Francis has done, instead, is to ask for forgiveness.  

Forgiveness, that in the Vatican in March, this very same pope spoke of as a process involving “letting go of resentments and forgiving those who have wronged them so that they may experience God’s forgiveness”. 

“God’s forgiveness is felt strongly within us as long as we forgive others. And this isn’t easy because grudges make a nest in our heart and there is always that bitterness”, he said. “Accusing ourselves is the first step towards forgiveness. To accuse one’s self is part of the Christian wisdom. No, not accusing others; ourselves. ‘I have sinned’”.

It is difficult for any survivor to read these words and not flinch, not feel the wound is being reopened through denial. Rape and violence against women and children, systematic oppression and communal ostracism are not simple word-wounds, like grudges or resentments. These wounds pulse. They are live. They are fleshy and raw and they beat and writhe and sweat and tremble. 

What is the sin we are pointing to here? What is the accusation?
Being vulnerable? 
Being human?  

Michael O’Brien, speaking to a Government Minister on Question and Answers after the Ryan Report, embodied what it is to live as the survivor of this type of abuse meeting such Jesuitical argumentation. 

 “Don’t make a political football out of this. You hurt us when you do that. You tear the shreds from our bodies. For God’s sake, try and give us some peace. Try and give us some peace and not to continue hurting us. That woman there will tell how many times I jump out of the bed with the sweat pumping out of me because I see  these fellas at the end of the bed… to pull me into the room to rape me and buckle me and beat me”. 

There are no words to respond to this. There could never be. It must be seen, and heard, and felt, and witnessed.

We all know what it is to receive a mealy-mouthed apology, one that takes away as it gives. In the case of clerical abuses and the wholesale blindness and collusion in sadism and sexual violence that characterised the experiences of so many, it is a profound indignity.

Harvard Professor Donna Hicks, who has facilitated many conflict transformation processes around the world, defines dignity as “an internal state of peace that comes with the recognition and acceptance of the value and vulnerability of all living things.”

Dignity is the peace that comes from valuing eachother as inherently worthy. It is a birthright beyond status. Meeting the pain wrought by the abuses of the Catholic Church in Ireland without further violating the dignity of the survivors means allowing that the story can and must be told, and the hurts named, without equivocation – without anyone saying “ah well, that’s the way things were then”; without questioning, without saying “that’s the way insitutions go”, without denial or hiding or side-stepping or saving face, or pretending evil is not evil, that the Devil does not live in these actions.

Dignity comes with presence, with showing up to what is real and what is here, which in the case of the traumas perpetrated on women, children and minorities by representatives of the powerful Church is present with each breath, in every moment, and endured and contained and so very hard to bear. 

Traumas of the magnitude of Michael O’Brien’s cannot be cured, only carried – and the most egregious and terrible reality of these traumas is how they ripple out and impact upon the innocent across generations. 

As Dr. Paul D’Alton, Principal Clinical Psychologist at St. Vincent’s Hospital wrote earlier this year of the need to recognise the emotional and psychological complexity of this visit:

“It is said that every childhood lasts a lifetime – when it comes to abuse this is not true. Every childhood abused lasts for several lifetimes. It ripples out for generations to come and risks destroying many lives. The barbarity is compounded by the intergenerational impact the abuse of one child will have. It reverberates for generations”.

This is Michael O’ Brien’s story. It is also my story, your story, all our stories. Though I have fought hard against its reality, it is also my childrens’ story, because of how it has been mine, even if they are not to be baptised within this Church, even if they never step inside one.

This story is not to be understood as a collection of words, but an embodied and lived reality that can only be met and tended to with loving presence as an open wound: held gently, seen, valued and cared for with immense tenderness. It is a story we must weep over, as loving witnesses, breathe with and through, touch gently and hold warmly through every terror.

Which is to say, most ironically of all in this context, that it can never be resolved by meeting it with the words of scripture or doctrine or law, or mealy mouthed apologies or surface-bandaged with protection plans and pristine policies, but only with the heart; with the body. 

Which is to say, not with judgement or reason or strategies, but with love - the love, to use the most apt Christian metaphor,  of Mary Magdalene herself, at the foot of the cross – Mary, the healed,  whom Jesus rescued from the extreme overwhelm of her own darkness, the seven demons who had threatened to destroy her. Mary, who in the tomb of the Resurrection, wept for her defiled Lord, wishing to care for and honour His broken body.  

Oh, how we forsook her in this country, and how we have reaped such darkness in sowing those seeds! Alcoholism, addiction, fear, despair, suicidality, the endless cycle of abuse, estrangements and cut offs and feuds and misery: all the fruits of our frozen disconnection from the warm softness of our animal bodies.

When agents of the Church can meet with survivors and weep for and with them as Mary Magdalene did the messy dirty-nailed earthy disoriented  new barely recognisable Jesus in the tomb - and WEEP, truly and fully, for how it systematically destroyed the very love, nurture and protection it was supposed to provide, forgiveness can function.

When those in power take restorative action to speak the story, name the hurts honestly and ensure those responsible for them meet legal consequences in this lifetime, compassion will be an action not an observation or a self-serving homily. 

When, with presence, dialogue, time and concrete action to prevent this ever occurring again, the Church meets with the real live humans impacted upon by its action and inaction to hear, see, listen and witness their pain and suffering, as it is and not as they would say it is - then, perhaps, papal forgiveness may have some true Christian (true human) meaning.

For now, it is as empty and cold and dead as any stone statue, with no relevance to releasing the trauma of the survivors of clerical abuse.  

To think any other way is to perpetuate a collective madness that we can no longer deny or excuse. To think otherwise is, frankly: unforgivable.