Today the Pope will issue a pastoral letter on the seemingly never-ending sex-abuse scandals in the Catholic church in Ireland.

As part of his preparation in writing the letter, last month the Pope summoned the bishops of Ireland to the Vatican for a meeting to discuss the allegations, the convictions, the cover-ups and the attitudes that led to such a sorry state of affairs.

The meeting did not go well, but not for any reasons you might have thought. There was little sense of shame, or contrition, or repentance, or reconciliation reported in the media, secular or catholic. Instead, The Tablet reported that a number of bishops were angered by the ceremonial formality of the meeting:

The Bishop of Killaloe, Dr Willie Walsh, said people in Ireland had been “rightly angry at the apparent pomp and ceremony and the kissing of the Pope’s ring” by bishops when they greeted Benedict XVI.1

Really, Dr Walsh? Were the people of Ireland really angry that the Vatican palace is a formal and ritualised place? Were the laity of Killaloe pained on behalf of your hurt amour-propre? Was diplomatic and ecclesiastical protocol the major issue of the meeting? Tell me, Dr Walsh, how is life in the eighteenth century?

This was a meeting at which the chief pastors of a church, having utterly forgotten their responsibilities to pastor and care for the most vulnerable and trusting, were to be called to account. And you didn’t like the seating plan.

It seems that there are bishops, in all churches, who are men of strong and certain principles, chief of which is they are a very senior and important people2, and should be treated as such. A friend of mine, who once trained baby cathedral clergy, told them the greatest challenge they faced in their ministry was the confusion between working in a big and important building and thinking themselves to be big and important people. Willie Walsh (obviously distracted by the BA strike) has succumbed.

Today the Pope will issue his pastoral letter. What’s the betting some big and important bishops will complain about the typeface?

  1. ‘Vatican formalities anger hostile Ireland’, The Tablet, 13 March 2010, p. 42 [↩]
  2. h/t Clayboy [↩]