Quite honestly, I don’t know if Jesus Christ is going to return to earth, but if he does he’s going to be pretty upset(sauer). The Catholic Church must be the worst-managed organisation in the world. The Vatican has become captive of its own fear of public embarrassment.Papal secrecy, designed to protect the church from state intrusion, has been devalued and is now used to mask wrong-doing and incompetence.

 

Hard words, I know, and a Catholic friend advises me to be more charitable. The church, he tells me, moves on a different, glacial time scale.Its basic time unit is the half-centiry. That is how long it will take to open up the institution in the way that was envisaged by some of the Second Vatrican Council advisers. Faith, he tells me in a smokey pub, is still strong at its very core; it is the practitioners who are weak. Well, that’s what the leftists used to tell me about communism–good idea, badly carried out. And there has always been a robust scepticism in England about the priesthood. Our great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, wrote in the fourteenth century:

 

“If gold rust, what will iron do?

 For if a priest be foul in who we trust

No wonder that a common man should rust.”

 

Corrupt priests, in other words, are a problem for us all. I think the Catholics are making it too easy on themselves. Yes, of course, paedophilia is not exclusive to Catholicism and yes, the link with priestly celibacy has only vaguely been established and yes, again, parts of the media want to wrongfoot the German Pope, the former Panzerkardinal. But, but,but….it is very difficult to make ones peace with a church that lays claim to uniquely high standards of schooling, that takes our children and promises to make them rounded, spiritually aware individuals–and then betrays them. The crime of child abuse is denied, sealled in silence; the priest is moved to another parish like a thief on the run. And the child is left alone, often unable to communicate his or her confusion to his or her parents. Damaged goods.

 

The transfer of errant priests is part of a system.It happened in Ireland(the priests were sent to the USA); it happened in Spain(the priests were sent to Latin America) and it has been happening here(the priests were sent to Bavaria). It is good of course that the Pope, in last months letter to the Irish bishops, at last acknowledged that there had been victims of these priest-crimes. And there has been a sort of apology.

 

But Benedict does not seem to understand that there is an institutional problem. The church as an organisation no longer seems to many believers(45 per cent of Catholics according to FORSA) to be serving it followers. There is a credibility gap.

 

For me what has disappeared is the basic goodwill towards the Church, the sense of warmth. When I lived in Poland there was a feeling of rightness about going to church with the family to have a priest bless our Easter eggs. Now that just seems like sentimental bunkum.

 

I shall be going back to church again this sunday, this time with a notebook and a pen in my hand. The Times has sent its reporters–in Rome,Ireland, Madrid, Boston, here–to monitor the sermons . How will the priest reconcile the Easter message of resurrection and suffering, with its own failure to shoulder its responsibility? It will take a rhetorical masterpiece to convince me. My newspaper is of course not the only medium to have this idea. The US television teams have been charting their easter strategy as if they were about to send correspondents to the Front. In a way they are: they are supposed to chronicle a Church at bay, a great power on the defensive. They were discussing destinations at the Pariser Platz Starbucks. Augsburg to film Mixa, accused of beating teenagers? Regensburg, to interview abused Domspatzen? Bonn, Munich? So many Fronts; so many disturbing stories.

 

But, of course, if I’m going to Church as a reporter rather than as a worshipper I have to put aside my personal distaste. The aim has to be to identify the nuances in this crisis. I know from my own experience that there was much brutality in the schooling system of the 1960s. We had many teachers who had fought in the war and came to us not only with missing arms but with undeclared psychological disorders. They were full of anger and they beat us. It was probably the same in Germany.

 

The flip-side of this classroom aggression was paedophilia. The paedophiles were the only teachers to show tenderness, recognise the reality of home sickness. Later we understood they were weak and manipulative, but at the time the kids, without fully understanding what was going on, accepted their “kindness”. The anger, the sense of violation, came sometimes decades later. I think this is what is happening in the Catholic Church. The victims are waking up, suddenly understanding what went wrong with their childhood.

 

And they are realising that the Church has been shielding these molesters with such thoroughness that the priests felt immune. When a priest got into trouble he was told to pack his bags and move on. Instead, the church hierarchy should have ordered him to face his accusers, his victims, accept the criminality of his act. Only then comes repentance and possibly forgiveness. By not insisting on this, the Church has shown itself to be an institution with the heart of a coward. I do not want to be part of a church that lacks courage.

 

Happy easter anyway. Perhaps we will see each other in church. Or perhaps not.