If the FA’s head can be forced to resign, why can’t Cardinal Nichols?
Cardinal Vincent Nichols (PA Images)
The Football Association and the Roman Catholic Church don’t have much in common. But they are both troubled organisations. Their juxtaposition in the news this week makes painful reading for both soccer fans and the Catholic laity — especially the latter.
Most striking is the contrast in how they have dealt with criticism. The chairman of the FA, Greg Clarke, has resigned immediately, after speaking of “coloured footballers” and stereotyping Asians while giving evidence to a Parliamentary committee. Nobody has suggested that Clarke is guilty of racist conduct, merely that his language was incompatible with his position. But the FA has set an example that the Church has so far failed to follow.
After a damning report into the abuse of children by clergy of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, its head, the Archbishop of Westminster, is still in place. Although Cardinal Vincent Nichols is no abuser, he is personally criticised in the report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which has investigated 900 complaints against priests, monks and other staff, covering more than 3,000 incidents between 1970 and 2015. The report singles out the Cardinal for his lack of compassion towards survivors of abuse and concludes: “It is difficult to exercise good leadership if you engage in bad practice.”
Cardinal Nichols says that he offered his resignation to Pope Francis but was refused: “The Holy Father put me here and he tells me to stay here — that’s enough for me.” It is unlikely to be enough for his flock, however. Catholics are sick of seeing senior churchmen evading the consequences of their actions, whether sins of commission or omission. It is routine for cardinals to offer their resignation when they reach the age of 75 and they are often refused — but in this case it was incumbent on the Pope to accept it. In any case, the Vatican’s role is also criticised in the report, which states that its officials’ “lack of cooperation passes understanding”.
The Church in the United States, too, has been rocked by the abuse scandal surrounding Theodore McCarrick, a former Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, DC. Thanks to a cover-up under three pontificates, McCarrick was able to escape justice until last year, when he was finally defrocked aged almost 90 after half a century of abusing seminarians and others.
The failure of the Catholic hierarchy to practise what its members preach has done irreparable damage to the Church’s reputation and its mission in the secular world. If a sports official can be forced out merely for using inappropriate language, how can a Cardinal Archbishop remain in office after an independent inquiry condemns him for far more grievous failures of leadership? It sometimes seems as if the lack of accountability in the Catholic Church may one day be its downfall. If Pope Francis has any doubt about that, he should look about himself. Monuments to the defunct paganism of the ancient Romans are everywhere in the Eternal City. If he looks a little harder, he could also find traces of the last time Rome was sacked in 1527 by soldiers loyal to the Emperor Charles V — most of them German followers of Martin Luther, who had denounced the Papacy in literally apocalyptic terms. Most of the population was killed or fled, the city was devastated and then Pope, Clement VII, was held prisoner in the Castel Sant’Angelo until he was ransomed. The sack was seen by many at the time as a divine judgement on the corruption of the Church.
Today, the equivalent of the vices that provoked the Reformation is the predatory child sexual abuse, committed by clergy and concealed by the hierarchy. For too long, evil has been hiding in plain sight. Words are no longer enough to make amends. If the Church in this country is to have any hope of recovery from its own morbid affliction and the miasma of public suspicion, Cardinal Nichols must go — without delay.
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