'How many times can you apologise?'' Mark Coleridge, our Catholic Archbishop asked a little waspishly on the ABC yesterday, commenting on the latest child sex abuse case involving a religious brother. Seeming to realise almost immediately that this could be taken out of context, he added that mere apologies were not enough, and that what mattered was action.
There will be more apologies, for, no doubt, there will be more cases, if only as part of the clean-up of a nightmare that has yet to end. In certain respects, however, one might expect that the years ahead will produce fewer fresh cases, if only because the structure of Catholic schools is now so much different, with very few nuns, brothers and priests still engaged. Most schools are now firmly under the practical control of lay teachers. There will still be cases of such abuse - which has never ever been confined to Catholic schools, Catholic religious, or cultures of shame, secrecy and denial - but we can all hope that the worst days of an abusive culture are behind us.
The Catholic Church, perhaps more than other churches, has been through a well deserved hell, accused of helping create the culture in which abuse could flourish undetected, of denial or inadequate responses, of seeking to protect itself rather than reaching out to victims. In the United States, bishops have had to resign, and dioceses rendered virtually bankrupt by litigation. More damaging, church credibility has suffered and the message, not least about sexuality and love, seriously weakened by the obvious reproach about the conduct of church servants. The credibility of many great social works of the church, not least in educating more than a million citizens is undermined.
There is no point in apologists defensively stating how few were involved. One was too many, and there were many more than that. Over the past century perhaps 80,000 Australian Catholics have been members, for at least a time, of religious orders, most of them as religious brothers or sisters teaching in Catholic schools.
There are credible allegations against perhaps 500 (many now dead), and reasonable questions about aspects of the conduct of several thousand more. If we doubled these figures to allow for the effects of death, shame, secrecy and denial, we would still have tens of thousands of innocent priests, brothers and nuns, bearing the stigmata of the suspicion and doubt that the epidemic brought on. And now suddenly defensive about the value of life's work one to which they dedicated themselves not for money, status or comfort but because they thought themselves to be answering a call from God.
These people were responsible, for the education of, at any one time, about a quarter of the population. Catholics shunned the public school system from its inception in the 19th century, and ran schools without state aid for 80 years until the 1960s. The schools were spare, sparse, and often harsh places, but they brought Catholics to full and demanding citizenship.
Some of the religious who made this possible are relations of mine, others friends and neighbours. I will not attack them simply because some (by definition too many) colleagues violated the trust placed in them. Bitterness must go to a human institution which inadequately prepared them for the life they took on.
I do not know Brother Kostka, sentenced this week for sexual abuse of his charges, I know many like him. My compassion is first for his victims. But I will save some for him too, some forgiveness too, and, if not excuses, some understanding.
He joined his religious order as not much more than a child, having already himself been a victim of sexual abuse. The religious order which welcomed him was good at the moral and intellectual formation of young men, but very, very poor at understanding their physical and sexual development. Those who trained and nurtured Brother Kostka had probably much the same sort of background as he did and can no more easily be condemned for their ignorance.
This was a French order more sophisticated and, in an Irish phrase, more "lace curtain" than Irish orders such as the Christian and Patrician Brothers. But it, like them, was seriously infected by Jansenism, the besetting sin of Irish Catholicism. Jansenism officially a heresy for centuries is, in its persistent form, an anti-human and anti-Christian philosophy of body hatred and belief that anything concerned with human energies and passions, including food, drink, sex, and pleasure of almost any sort is intrinsically base, evil and a distraction from the higher thoughts and passions. Its persistence, particularly in Australia, is one of the reasons why so many Australian Catholic leaders seem obsessed with matters of sexual morality and oblivious to wider evils in the world such as war, intolerance and injustice. And, why so many cling to imagined authority and tend to denounce any appeal to reason or conscience as relativism.
Even as an old man, Kostka's understanding of sex was as a child's. He, too, is a victim of a deficient and inhuman, but as yet unreformed, seminary and novitiate system. That does not mean that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong, or that he is excused punishment. But it might suggest that our anger is better focused on a system which churned people like him out, and that our determination to make good our apologies by avoiding repeats involves the church itself focusing on how it let so many of its noble volunteers down.
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