SUMMERSIDE - It's going to take the combined efforts of all members of the Catholic church to bring about an understanding of how the sexual abuse of children has been allowed to happen within the church and to find a way to ensure it never happens again.
Sister Nuala Kenny, professor emeritus Dalhousie University and Ethics and Policy Advisor Catholic Health Alliance of Canada, has made it her life's goal to help deal with the problem of sexual abuse within the church by urging all church members to work together with their bishops and clergy to renew and revitalize the church.
Her message to the annual convention of the Catholic Women's League in Summerside on Saturday was the issue has to be discussed openly and honestly if any real change is going to take place.
"There are still many in the church who get very anxious that if you talk about difficult things in the church you're being disloyal," she said. "Please understand this is a very uniquely Catholic thing. The idea that you don't discuss difficult things is totally foreign to me. I'm a doctor. I was trained in diagnostics. What's wrong with you and why?
I believe there is not one of us here who does not love our church or is not acutely aware that we have been through very difficult expositions of painful non-Christ like activity in our church. And all of us have been affected."
Kenny was part of a five-person public commission to study abuse following the revelations at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland.
"This was a hurt and a tragedy of enormous proportion," Kenny said. "Something happened here that was horrific."
Kenny was part of the team the produced a document called the Winter Report in 1990.
It identified what happened and why.
"That's the issue - why?" she said. Why did it happen as it did. It's the denial, the mismanagement that's the ecclesiastical issue we're facing. The way it happen, that is the crisis for us. What is it that allowed it to happen?"
Another document entitled Breach of Faith Breach of Trust came out shortly after and was a discussion package on why this happened and for as long as it happened in the church - what is it about the church that allowed it to happen.
She said it was hardly ever used and some bishops never used because many felt that "talking about it will make it worse."
She said that response is at the heart of the secrecy and denial that has allowed the church to less than what it should.
"We all must come to the aid of our church to help restore and renew that's the bottom line," she said.
Kenny said Pope Benedict is addressing the issue in a very public manner.
She said he set the tone with the following statement: "We must ask ourselves what we can do to repair as much as possible the injustice that has occurred. We must ask ourselves what was wrong in our proclamation in our whole way of living the Christian life to allow such a thing to happen."
Kenny said all of the church; all of its members have a stake in the future of the Catholic church and a responsibility to help in its renewal.
Blaming the bishops and the clergy as the reason that this happened the way it did is in itself unfair and unjust.
"We are far more in numbers than our bishops and priests and we should be working with them," she said.
