Is the Catholic Church willing or even able to reform itself? Questions that are difficult, maybe impossible to answer at this juncture.
If you had tuned into the media in the last two weeks, you would have found those questions prominent in the news agenda. And the questions are tantalising and depressing.
The Irish Church was among the first and the worst to be subject to revelations of clerical child sexual abuse. The scandal has been reignited by the publication of a scoping inquiry, ordered by the Irish Government, into schools run by religious orders. Nearly 2,400 allegations of sexual abuse in respect of 308 schools was the headline figure in the report.
The awful stories of abuse once again dominated the media, admittedly more in the south than in the north. Newspapers and media outlets were packed with the voices of those who suffered between the years 1927 to 2013.
Dermot Farrell, the Archbishop of Dublin, issued a statement in response to the report saying there will be no reform or renewal of the Catholic Church until the abuse crisis has been fully addressed.
According to the Archbishop, there is still a culture of denial within the Church. That would appear to be a new and important angle on the ongoing crisis, partly because many people see Farrell as the most thoughtful and influential bishop in Ireland.
Hilaire Belloc, a poet and acknowledged Catholic writer, said more than a hundred years ago that proof of the divinity of the Catholic Church might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight. That statement, and others like it, have seeped into the consciousness of Catholics.
But knavish imbecility is one thing, moral malaise is a horse of a different colour, especially when it refers to children and the warning by Christ about a millstone around the neck and being thrown into the sea for anyone leading a child astray.
Meanwhile, in Belgium, where Pope Francis was carrying out a pastoral visitation, the same anger and call for reform was being expressed by some prominent universities and by the President and the King. Belgium, like Ireland, is responding to the shock and the pain at the extent of sexual abuse carried out by clerics that was subsequently covered up by bishops.
At a local level, we don’t talk much of these things. I can only recall one very obtuse statement read out in a local church pertaining to an issue in the Derry diocese and that occurred before the full horror of the abuse became public.
There have been statements issued by hierarchies in this and many other countries and apologies of sorry and shame offered to those who suffered. But those statements never led to the radical reform that would be convincing that the culture of denial was finally dead and buried. They certainly have not convinced the Archbishop of Dublin.
There is a mechanism of change that is occasionally used in the world of politics. In itself it does not create change, but it opens up the debate and exposes the depth of resistance to possible remedies.
It is the appointment of a kitchen cabinet, made up of people who are disinterested and preferably antagonistic to the culture and the mores of an organisation. Its job is to analyse and critique the systems, to understand and challenge the attitudes and to propose better methodologies, even ones that would surprise or shock the leaders of the organisation. A prior agreement that the cabinet can report honestly and fully to the constituency or the congregation is essential.
The resistance to such a proposal is that the Church is neither a political party nor, as Hilaire Belloc said, solely a human construct. But the response to that is there is no divinity in that aspect of Church that facilitated sexual abuse.
Knavish imbecility is one thing, moral malaise is a horse of a different colour, especially when it refers to children