It has been said that confession is good for the soul, but what are we to make of Cormac Murphy-O’Connor’s confession (“I will always look back on my decision with sorrow and shame”, The Tablet, 2 May)? He said: “To my shame it only gradually began to sink in just how much damage abuse causes to victims.” This is an admission of an ongoing process of enlightenment. It implies a mental journey at a state of recognition of realities. The immediate question here is what did he think were the consequences, or did he think the consequences were benign? Is it conceivable that a priest of the Counter Reformation Catholic Church, with all its stress on sexual sin and guilt, could be so ignorant?
You do not have to be a genius or to travel a mental road of awakening to know that the sexual abuse of children leaves indelible scars and that such scars are magnified in cases of clerical abuse. I can only hope that Murphy-O’Connor’s confession has done him some good. It leaves me still waiting for someone in authority to articularte the sense of outrage the vast majority of my generation of Catholics feel when reading such accounts as his confession.
Richard Holden, Taunton, Somerset
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