"Only the church can heal what the church has broken. "

These words of Archbishop Hepworth's struck me when I first read them because I knew then he was speaking from deep, personal experience. In light of the latest revelations from The Australian, I am posting them again. Follow the link for the entire charge.

The roots of theological destructiveness – and please remember that theology has been for centuries regarded as the queen of sciences – has had its roots in the Enlightenment and the resulting challenge to the reality of divine revelation in England and Germany 150 years ago. The denial of the divinity of Christ, the denial of the very fact of the Christ event, the denial of the power of the Holy Spirit in baptism, the denial of the Resurrection, the denial of a creating God at the heart of the cosmos, the denial of the great Pauline parallel between the husband and his wife and the Christ and his church, the denial of guilt and personal sin, the denial of God’s self revelation as Trinity, the denial of the necessity and reality of the cross and redemption, the denial of the divine institution and necessity of sacraments for salvation, and the ultimate denial of judgement and accountability in which this life is but a moment of preparation for an eternity that can only be glimpsed as in the mirror faintly – all this has been but a prelude to a cataclysmic failure of personal morality that manifests itself as a crisis of abuse and especially in the sexual abuse of the young and the vulnerable. The church is seen to be a church of violence in that most cruel area of violence in which the sanctity of sexuality within a stable and loving family is perverted into what Pope Benedict constantly calls the filth and perversion of a lust that has been quenched without regard to the lives that are destroyed in the quenching.

It is true that in most parts of the world a majority of abuse takes place within the family. This is an utterly damning fact of the extent to which we live in a society whose corruption is rapidly expanding and destroying that heart of human love and stability. But the abuse within the Church by those in positions of sacred trust, whether they be religious or clergy or laity in positions of trust and influence – is generally and rightly regarded as more corrosive of victims’ lives than that which occurs elsewhere. The innate contradiction between a priest who can sodomise teenagers and go from that to handling the Son of God himself at the altar is as vast as any contradiction we can encounter. Both Hitler and Stalin attempted to destroy the church by destroying its priesthood. Neither succeeded. Martyrs are the lifeblood of the church. But in the past 50 years the priesthood has begun to destroy itself. And let us be quite clear. The verbal abuse that destroys a person’s confidence in their own personality, the physical abuse of unreasonable punishments and sadism, and the sexual abuse that ranges from inappropriate touching to sodomy and rape protected by blackmail are simply different points on a pathway that has destroyed not thousands but tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives that the Church has touched – but not for the better – in our generation. Ireland admits that one in five of its population have been abused by someone within the church. Parts of Australia have a percentage almost as high.

The aftermath of abuse is destructive for the abusers. To hold the heights of depravity and the heights of sanctity within a single personality is utterly destructive. The church has an ultimate responsibility to everyone within it and to all people even to the ends of the earth. To minister to those whose ministry has turned to abuse is one of the most difficult and complex tasks that confront the church in our time. That we have people prepared to go into prisons and remand centres and sit for week after week and year after year slowly seeking to crack the tough shell with which these people try to protect themselves from themselves is an inspiration to us but more importantly places massive demands on the prayers and the sacrifices with which we support them.

And the aftermath of abuse is destructive for the victims. Victims experience the most powerful sense of shame and guilt, passionately believing that they provoked and invited the things that happened. They believe that their relationship with God is beyond redemption and their attitude to God turns often to anger and rejection. They struggle with minds that are dominated by images of their sexual experiences and often turn to drugs and drink to escape their own minds with which they cannot live. In over 40 years to priesthood, I have done too many funerals of young men whom I think now must have been victims because of the way in which they killed themselves. Because of their image of being un-clean victims will have problems with things that are sacred. Because their social development in key areas is often frozen they will fail consistently in relationships. And especially if they are men they will find it almost impossible to speak of what has happened. Often they may come to speak later in life and only because of some cataclysmic stimulus in which speaking suddenly becomes possible. And then there is the trauma of remembering and the trauma of trying to learn what parts of their life might have been a product of abuse and what parts might genuinely have been products of a sinful mind. There is in fact no known escape for the victims.

I know of these things now because a bishop is bound in today’s Church to learn what there is to know. He must ensure every way possible that the past is not repeated. And since only the church can heal what the church has done, it is the responsibility of the Bishop to ensure that his clergy and people will respond with healing when they encounter the one in five or 10 that our statistics still tell us are waiting, perhaps longing, for the chance to tell someone in the church the story of their own lives. A victim will often only try once to turn to the church for help, and everything hangs on the spiritual and professional skill of the one to whom they turn to, be it lay or be it clergy. Each of us has the responsibility to be prepared. Only the church can heal what the church has broken. And until the church learns to heal its victims, the church will itself remain broken and unhealed.