Collective penance
On Sunday, Bishop Donal McKeown addressed a 112-year-old Irish temperance association in a homily during which he spent a large portion of the time discussing clerical abuse:
Many criticised the Holy Father when, in his letter to the Catholics of Ireland, he spoke of the need to do penance and proposed that Friday should be kept as a weekly day of penance. Some commentators dismissed that as asking the ordinary people of Ireland to do penance for the sins of clergy and bishops — and they couldn’t understand that idea. But all Christians come from the strange belief that Jesus is the innocent One, the Lamb of God that took away the sin of the world. Our secular society — that so often likes to locate sin and repentance only in individuals rather than accepting the possibility of corporate responsibility — cannot easily comprehend the idea of doing penance and making reparation for others. But Pioneers and all Christians can. … Continue to do penance for the sins of those Church personnel who abused children.
He also, by the way, wished that the “secular hierarchy” would “accept that they too share responsibility” for child abuse because they are entrusted with “righteously punishing offenders”. These would be the same offenders that the Church has … actually, never mind. There’s just simply nothing snarky that I can say here that would begin to do this wickedness justice. I guess I can sum it up this way: the bishop is right in his argument that this is strong evidence for the existence of evil and the need for reparation. But the evil is in his speech, and the responsibility for reparation is not on the secular.
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