Diocesan News13 Jun 09

'We are a nation in trauma' says Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork

Speaking at the Diocesan Synod of Cork, Cloyne and Ross in the Rochestown Park Hotel in Cork on Saturday 13th June 2009, the Church of Ireland Bishop of Cork, Bishop Paul Colton, said that the Irish people have been traumatised by the Report of the Commission to enquire into Child abuse. He emphasised, however, that our trauma is nothing when compared with the interminable suffering of the victims: ‘As we have seen again and again, their tears continue to flow.’

‘Only the victims matter,’ Bishop Colton said.  He said that there have been far too many impetuous responses to the report without pause for thought or reflection.  He also said that this shame ‘must prompt us all in every church and in every institution in society to take a good hard look at ourselves and to ask what abuses or inhuman injustices we are responsible for perpetuating or exacerbating today.’

Bishop Colton said: 

“In the midst of a national trauma, there have been too many impetuous responses without the humility of sufficient pause for thought and reflection.  Many of these are tangential to the needs of the victims. All other agendas should be set aside. Some people in Ireland have used this report as a springboard towards a secularising agenda.  Others have called unthinkingly for the withdrawal of all churches from their modern-day engagement with education in a country, which, according to the last census, is still manifestly religious in its affiliation.  Still others use an old-fashioned and distorted republicanism and link what happened with injustices in the pre-independence era.  Some commentators expose the limitations of their own understanding of the modern, pluralist Ireland by speaking as if, even now in 2009, there is only one Christian denomination or religious grouping in this State.

In the midst of this trauma, the only people who matter are the victims:  they must be the centre of all our concerns and efforts. In the aftermath of the Report, people who were abused should be the priority of this nation, its institutions and of all of us.

What I would say is that this shame must prompt us all in every church and in every institution in society to take a good hard look at ourselves, and to ask what abuses or inhuman injustices we are responsible for perpetuating or exacerbating today.”