Our society has been left with no moral compass
Pope Benedict is the head of a Church that has been badly damaged by the abuse scandals
One of the many tragedies of the clerical abuse scandals is the enormous loss of moral authority suffered by the Catholic Church, especially the bishops.
Of course, there are those who would happily see the Church disappear off the face of the earth. But every society needs moral leadership and while high-profile individuals here and there offer such leadership, no Irish institution has the moral authority necessary to lead us out of our present crisis.
The trade unions don't. The beating of the tribal drums by the public sector unions amounts to a low-level class war against the bankers and other 'fat-cats'.
The captains of finance and industry obviously have no moral authority. The sight of the fraud squad raiding the head office of Anglo Irish Bank was confirmation of that.
Our politicians, too, have lost moral authority. Certain politicians have authority, but not politics as a whole. Fianna Fail is too close to the 'golden circle' and made a mess of the public finances.
Labour isn't a credible alternative. Fine Gael under Enda Kenny simply doesn't have the necessarily heft to exploit Fianna Fail's travails. It should be on 40pc in the polls, not 32pc.
This week the Church issued its latest child protection guidelines, 'Safeguarding Children'.
Like the regulations governing the banks, they will only be as good as those implementing them. One consolation is that the National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church appears to have the toughness to do the job.
If the clerical scandals had never happened, the Church would still be a diminished force in Irish life.
Secularisation in some form was inevitable. But the scandals have caused the Church to become far more diminished than it needed to be.
The current crisis is tailor-made for an institution with real moral authority to rally people to do what needs to be done. The Bible is full of relevant stories, for example, the one about the man who built his house on sand only to see it washed away.
Or what about the story of Pharaoh's dream, the one about the seven fat cows and the seven skinny cows? Joseph told Pharaoh that the seven fat cows represented seven years of plenty and the seven skinny cows, seven years of famine. He told him to save up during the years of plenty in order to prepare for the years of scarcity.
Then there is the story of the Golden Calf and how the Israelites began to worship it. Moses had to come down from Mount Sinai to deal with that one. In the Bible, God was always good at raising up a prophet when one was needed. Wouldn't now be a good time?
Building your house on a solid foundation, saving up in the good times for a rainy day, not worshipping money: all this sounds like pretty good advice. A credible Church putting this advice before us might actually have been listened to -- meaning we'd be in much better shape today than we are.
Lent has just begun. Some Lenten self-denial would have also gone a long way during the boom years. In Sweden, when they had their banking crisis in the 1990s, public spending was cut by 4pc and taxes went up by 4pc.
It would be much easier to persuade people to make the necessary sacrifices if there was an institution with the moral authority to make us listen.
The Church could have been that institution, but the scandals put paid to that.
That is not only the Church's tragedy. It's ours as well.
P.S. On Monday's 'Today with Pat Kenny', no fewer than four people were on a panel discussing same-sex marriage and all spoke in favour of it.
There was no dissenting voice and they were asked no hard questions.
RTE has given platform after platform to pro-gay marriage advocates and allowed them to make their case unchallenged. The station becomes more shameless by the day.
dquinn@independent.ie
- David Quinn
