As a Catholic priest ordained over 30 years ago, I welcome Georgina Lawton’s article (Catholicism held my family in its sway for decades – but it hid from me a vital truth, 14 August) as a valid, helpful, erudite and challenging contribution to the conversation on contemporary Catholicism. Like others ill-served by unfettered clericalism, she has every right to voice her experiences, a right enshrined in canon law. For too long, most Catholics – pastorally minded clergy and theologians among them – have been expected to keep silent. Meanwhile, those with power (almost exclusively celibate, ordained men) have brought shame and guilt on themselves by remaining mute and complicit in the face of heinous acts.
Silence is no longer a valid option. Paul Simon reminds us that “silence like a cancer grows” – and these silences have inflicted untold damage on the authentic mission of the church.
Abuse operates on many levels, and the “power” model that lies behind abuse bears no relation to the authority recognised by Jesus’s contemporaries. Pope Francis has urged us all to recognise and deal with this matter urgently. He has also proposed two instruments that can burst the silence. One is to become a truly inclusive church by adopting synodality. The second is to speak truth to power at every level, adopting the principle of parrhesia. Georgina’s article is a fine example of both.
Rev Peter C Montgomery
Warrington, Cheshire
• The deeply moving article by Georgina Lawton raises a number of important issues, including the integrity of Catholicism today. As a practising Roman Catholic priest, I could respond defensively, but, no, I can only offer empathy; for at my own mother’s funeral in 2021, I too found the local Catholic priest to be controlling and arrogant, leaving family members shocked. I felt ashamed, as half of my family aren’t Catholics.
My plea is that we shouldn’t extrapolate too much from our personal experience, even though it is often all we have that we can reference. Just because we had a bad experience at a school, high street coffee shop or sports club, it doesn’t make those institutions rotten.
Lawton offers a legitimate challenge to Catholicism, but my most enduring thought (which I offer with a degree of trepidation considering the circumstances Lawton faced) is that the sanctity of life promoted by the church in the first place could have helped form the moral compass which guided her mother to keep her, having become pregnant as a result of an affair, notwithstanding the obvious dislocation Lawton felt being black and being brought up in an all-white household.
Of all that Catholicism teaches, the sanctity of life is the bedrock that is no longer taken for granted in our culture, but is arguably the foundation of our civilisation and our freedoms.
Fr Simon Ellis
Birmingham
• Georgina Lawton’s encounter with a priest is par for the course. Priestly dogmatism and arrogance marred both my parents’ funerals in the UK, and also the funerals of my parents-in-law in the Netherlands.
My wife’s work in the Netherlands involves contacts with priests officiating at funerals and, almost without exception, the priests have displayed a complete disregard for relatives’ wishes and a manifest focus on keeping the service as short as possible while looking to maximise the return on the collection plate. Priest training instils a dogmatic view of the world in which canon law and arrogance take precedence over genuine pastoral care. The same values, in short, that have proven to be such fertile ground for the sexual abuses that were common at the Jesuit school to which I was sent, and the seminary in west Lancashire that my father attended.
My father’s school isolated the boys there, both geographically (it was in the middle of nowhere) and in the institution itself. Contacts were severely regulated, and closely monitored in prefect systems. Any discovery of physical intimacy was immediately followed by expulsion, with the obvious social repercussions in the 1950s/1960s, and the predictable descent into prostitution and/or suicide, neither of which seems to have given the church any pause for thought.
Later, in the 1970s at the Jesuit school I attended, cruel physical punishment was a regular occurrence, and sexual abuse was a fact of life. Not having any ability at sports, I escaped the latter since one of the priests in question preyed primarily on cricket or football players. As pointed out in the 2015 film Spotlight, I was one of the “lucky ones”. The system is rotten to the core.
Pete Thomas
Alkmaar, the Netherlands
• I’m now 82, white and the son of an Irish Catholic mother. I’ve been through the whole gamut of Catholic indoctrination, up to being an altar boy for the bishop on certain occasions. I went to a Catholic grammar school run by the Christian Brothers. Early schooling was under nuns at two primary schools.
Corporal punishment was liberally dished out for many an imagined breach of their narrow doctrines. In primary school, the nuns used their canes across the hands and backs of legs of mainly poor, undernourished working-class children.
At the grammar school, the brothers had specially designed leather straps, the kind you now see on sale in sex shops. They, too, used these instruments of torture against the working-class day boys. Heaven knows how they treated their boarders once school had closed for the day. I left home at the age of 17. The first adult decision I made was to leave the clutches of the Catholic church. I have never looked back. All these religious institutions are poisonous to growing, inquiring minds.
Michael James
Brighton
• I think I too would have walked out had the priest at my dad’s funeral said no one wants a long eulogy. But viscerally, I knew that saying something personal was necessary for me and my family – and thus it was important that the service was not dominated by the needs of the church or people who didn’t know my dad well. It was a Church of England service. My dad hadn’t attended since he was a young man, but they were more receptive to my family’s needs than the Catholic church described by Georgina Lawton.
I go to (the Catholic) Westminster Cathedral as much as I can. Why? I think it helps me to see priests as custodians, like a maitre d’ ensuring the smooth flow of the service. Mass or evening psalms are sung beautifully and I find myself connecting emotionally and spiritually to something nearer the origins of the faith – less about dogma and closer to a generational quest and profound celebration of something sacred.
Michael Gardiner
London
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