This silly posturing by the Irish Government on the Cloyne Report is an embarrassment to us all. They have succeeded, and in particular Enda Kenny has succeeded, in his over-the-top rhetoric in his so-called “historic” speech in Dail Eireann, in turning a local tragedy into a full-blown international diplomatic brouhaha. The Vatican is not a central player in this matter – nor did the Cloyne Report make it so. Mr. Kenny did. He did so on the basis of a more inept misreading of the ambiguously interpreted 1997 letter from Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos than even the Cloyne Report was guilty of.

Ireland’s Taoiseach, Enda Kenny

This whole thing is somewhat reminiscent of the rhetoric of the IRA when they held the British Government responsible for the atrocities they perpetrated in Northern Ireland over the last decades of the 20^th  century.While they were proclaiming themselves as freedom fighters they were simply compounding all the alienation between the two Northern communities which was the real cancer there. Instead of addressing the real and tragic sources of conflict, they exploited that tragedy to pursue their own anachronistic nationalist ideology.

Mr. Kenny has now succeeded in turning the tragedy of the destruction of children’s lives into a weapon which other ideologues can use to further their barely concealed anti-catholic venom.

Historic speech? I think history will in years to come view this speech as just a piece of ill-judged folly. More than one commentator has noted the hand of a not very competent speech-writer behind it, and clearly a speech-writer with an ulterior agenda. It might have been a good speech; it might have been a just speech; it might even have been a speech which would have deal a severe body-blow to the clericalism which has bedevilled this country since Catholic Emancipation in the early 19^th century. But it wasn’t.

The leader of a country can very usefully reassert the principles of independence and sovereignty which serve the common good of a nation. But it should be done with the dignity worthy of a people. It should be just and truthful.  As it was it was neither clever, competent nor just. It misunderstood what the Church is and it misunderstood even the incompetence of the role which some of the Church’s servants have played in this tragedy. It was angry but its anger smacked of little more than that of a spoiled child.

Bishop Fulton Sheen once said “There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be.” Enda Kenny surely added to the number of people in Ireland today who hate the Catholic Church for the very spurious reasons which he has presented them with. The bag of supporting letters he boasts of would seem to suggest so anyway. By failing to distinguish between errors of individual administrators in the Church, serving the Church badly, and the Church itself, which – in spite of the incompetence of some and the crimes of others – gives witness of heroic sanctity and apostolate throughout the world, he has done no service to anyone. Least of all has he served the victims of abuse who in truth will only find true healing of their wounds in that very Fold which he so intemperately excoriates.

A reading of this whole situation has been put to me by a friend from across the Atlantic. It sums up the fine mess we have got ourselves into as follows.

“From over here the reasoning seems to be:   the Irish government is upset at the Vatican because it didn’t make the Irish bishops take action.  The bishops, in turn, didn’t take action because they thought it was not what the Vatican would want.  The behavior of those who committed these actions would be considered illegal no matter where they took place.  So why didn’t the Irish government bring charges against the individuals involved when they found out about these actions? Forget about the hierarchy’s response.  Is the hierarchy running the government?  Is Ireland ruled by the Catholic Church?

“I would answer my question by saying that a clerical mentality pervades both the Church and the laity (Irish government).  The behavior was covered up or excused for the reason of not causing scandal.  Instead, by covering it up, an even greater scandal develops.  If these cases were dealt with by the criminal justice system as they arose, that would have served as a deterrent to further such cases.  But the inaction only allowed them to spread.  The bishops should have disciplined right away.  And the government should have acted earlier. “

The world looking at Ireland today can hardly be very edified by any of the local protagonists in this drama. Clearly, it’s not just our financial credit rating that is at junk level. Our general governance rating, civil and ecclesiastical, is also languishing with the junk.

The human urge to create scapegoats for the failures of individuals or societies collectively is a universal one. One cannot but help think that a manifestation of that urge can be seen in the rush to pin blame on the Catholic Church for all the abuse of children, now being exposed so harrowingly, which have been perpetrated within our society over the  later decades of the last century. The truth is that all of us must beat our breasts and accept responsibility for our blindness to this evil, willful or otherwise. The creation of scapegoats serves no purpose in a civilised society.

Ireland paraded its own version of the scapegoat before the world with a vengeance last week, with its prime minister, Mr. Enda Kenny, launching a vitriolic attack on the Vatican for its alleged complicity in a local Catholic diocese’s failure to adequately deal with abusive clerics. For some he was a hero. For others he was at best playing the disingenuous populist. The truth is that he missed the point entirely.

If we want to deal effectively with the scourge of abuse we will have to deal with the underlying moral roots of the malaise we are confronted with. Creating scapegoats is just sweeping the problem under the carpet and preventing us from getting on with the task of creating a society in which the gift of childhood innocence is adequately protected.

As in the body biological, so in the body politic. When the human skin manifests certain symptoms – for example, a swelling here, a reddening there, or an itch elsewhere – doctors will ask a few questions. If the symptoms are widespread enough the questions will be deeper and the examination will be thorough – or should be – until the root cause is identified. There will be an effort to relieve the symptoms but that will not be considered a solution to the underlying problem which both he and his patient both suspect may be lurking in the undergrowth. If he just tells his patient “take these three times a day and don’t worry”, he will probably end up being struck off the medical register.

We are doing just this with the whole child abuse crisis. Child protection measures are no more than sticking-plaster – with a touch of analgesic cream – on a cancerous growth in the heart of our society. The scapegoating of the Catholic Church for its undeniable failures in applying its own sticking-plaster is a smokescreen preventing us seeing what really lies at the heart of this malaise. The irony is that the Catholic Church is the only institution in society which in its solemn and official teaching points to the way in which society could be relieved of this mortal disease.

Ross Doubthat in a column in the New York Times back in May last year raised the very unpopular spectre of what might be some of the root causes of the incidence of abuse.  He reproduced a chart from the John Jay Report on sexual abuse in the Catholic priesthood, commissioned by the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, showing the number of credible accusations of abuse across the last half-century. On the basis of that he argued that “something in the moral/cultural/theological climate of the 1960s and 1970s encouraged a spike in sexual abuse”. He also asserted that the data showed that we’ve since seen the church come to grips with the problem, at least in the United States.

He did point out that it was “important to note that most of these incidents were reported in the 1990s and 2000s, years after they took place. This raises the question of whether the low numbers for the 1950s reflect a real difference between the rate of abuse in the Eisenhower era and the rate in the decades that followed, or whether it’s just that fewer of the victims from the ’50s have come forward with their stories, because of advanced age, greater shame, etc.” However, in spite of that, he could not but feel that the data suggest that “something significant really did shift, and escalate, in the years around the sexual revolution.” It is very hard to deny, he concluded, “that something changed in the 1960s, and not for the better.”

We know it did, don’t we? In fact we are never done boasting about it – our revolution, our liberation from repression and form all those taboos about sexual behaviour. This is the stuff we are sweeping under the carpet. The Irish, we are told, only discovered sex when TV came along in the 1960s. Then, bit by bit we accommodated ourselves to every permissive element in the new culture. But will we admit that this has anything whatsoever to do with the scandals we are now having to deal with? Not a hope.

Let us face the truth. The abuse of children is just part of a wider abuse. It is immediately horrific because it involves a sinister double fault. But our thinking is flawed. We talk about innocence but we do not really know what innocence is. We have obliterated guilt from our conscience in all matters of sexual morality which relate to ourselves as adults but we still try to hang on to a concept of guilt affecting the conscience of a child when abuse is perpetrated on him or her. We are right there but we are being inconsistent and hypocritical when we deny it to our own consciences.

The Jay report revealed a pattern which showed the effect of this erosion of conscience in the clerical segment of a population. If another survey were carried out among the general population it would also show a pattern but it would be different. There would be no evidence of any restoration to a normal healthy understanding of the true meaning of sexuality. Pope Paul VI’s encyclical, Humanae Vitae, spelled out for us some of the basic moral principles which should govern human sexuality. Some Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals and the Catechism of the Catholic Church further clarified and reaffirmed these. Self-abuse and homosexual practices – which are essentially the same – were intrinsically evil acts. There was pandemonium. For some it was nonsense, for others it was outrageous and dangerous, potentially a psychologically damaging teaching. No, in the permissive society all these things must be accepted as normal. The damage done to children and adolescents when they are abused is horrendous – but it is even more horrendous than some of the most vociferous condemnations even understand, precisely because of their own very flawed understanding of the true meaning of human sexuality, the meaning which has been almost universally destroyed in the Western world in the later part of the 20^th century.

Let us forget the scapegoats and get back to the real world. If we want to deal effectively with the scourge of abuse we will have to deal with the underlying moral roots of the malaise we are confronted with. Then we might begin to do something about the child abuse perpetrated by our divorce culture, by our soft-porn TV channels beamed into children’s bedrooms, and by our totally inadequate responses to the drink and drug culture which is wasting away the lives of so many young people. Creating scapegoats is just preventing us from getting on with the task of creating a society in which the gift of childhood innocence is adequately protected.

One night in December, 1170, King Henry II of England, so the story goes, cried out in exasperation, “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Prompted by that outburst, four knights in his entourage saddled up their horses, boarded a boat for England – Henry was holding court in France that Christmas, half of which constituted his Angevin Empire – and made their way to Canterbury Cathedral. There they set about murdering the Archbishop on the steps of the high altar as he was about to say Mass.

Why? Because Henry II and Archbishop Thomas á Becket were at loggerheads over their respective rights and duties. It all started over a case in which a criminal cleric had received what was deemed to be a too-lenient sentence in a Church court. At that primitive stage in the development of the common law system the respective jurisdictions of Church and State were not as defined as they are today. Church law was universal and codified to a degree that could not be matched by secular law. The law of might-is-right was still very prevalent as the law of the land in that age. Clerics had a right to be tried in Church courts just as the aristocracy had also the right to be tried by their peers in the House of Lords – or the Great Council as it was then known. But things were changing.

Henry II, although a rough and brutal man of his time, was one of the great law-making kings of England, seeking to bring the rule of law to bear on all in his kingdom. In this he clashed with the Church, particularly in the person of Thomas á Becket – who at one time was his Chancellor, as well as his bosom friend and companion. Church law was founded on Christian principles of justice, charity and mercy and ultimately was there to serve the work of the Church in the salvation of souls. To be able to do this work effectively, its freedom from the secular power was deemed essential. On this principle Becket had to make a stand against the incursions of the King – whose business was patently not the salvation of souls. Make a stand he did, and paid for it with his life.

Becket became a martyr and the place of his death and burial became one of the great shrines of medieval Europe. Henry repented his outburst, took responsibility for its consequences and came to the Canterbury and did public penance. How private that penance was is another matter. Becket, however, in the long history of the tensions between Church and State in the realm of lawmaking, remains a powerful symbol for all those who have to proclaim themselves in every age, as St. Thomas More did, “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.” Becket’s influence still resonated in the 16^thcentury when the English king finally did what Becket was essentially protecting the Church against – its domination by the secular power. Legend has it that Henry VIII, after he had executed St. Thomas More for refusing to recognise him as head of the Church in England, also had Becket tried. He then had his remains exhumed, and subsequently burned for his alleged treason. It is only a legend – but legends have their own way of telling the truth.

The great battle between those who set their hearts on the life of this world and those who have a clear vision of life here as but an integral part of an eternal life, seems endless. It is always there to some degree. But sometimes it flares up into all-out conflict – as it did with the persecution of the first Christians. So too, with the wars of the Protestant Reformation which were settled eventually with the acceptance of that horrific compromise, Cuius regio, eius religio, which translates as “Whose realm, his religion”  – the ruler will tell you what religion you must adhere to. Most horrific of all among the persecutions of believers were the horrors perpetrated in the twentieth century by the twin evils of communism and national socialism.

At times the conflict is a clearly defined struggle of good and evil. At other times not so. Such was the struggle between Henry II and Thomas á Becket. Both men were seeking justice in their own way – and while Becket’s vision of man and his destiny was a superior one to that of Henry, he was compromised to a degree by the evil perpetrated by those whom he sought to serve – and save – through the agency of a free and untrammelled Church.

Eight-hundred-odd years separate us today from the battle between Henry and Becket but there are signs that the Catholic Church in Ireland is now engaged in a conflict that in many ways is not dissimilar to theirs. The Church in Ireland has been tragically and shamefully compromised by its members, its servants, high and low. By their shameful acts of abuse and by the blundering response of some to those crimes, it has been left vulnerable to attack and is in danger of being crippled to the extent that its very raison d’être, evangelization and the salvation of souls, is compromised. As it seeks to protect itself and its mission it is accused of seeking to protect its “power”. Nonsense. The Church seeks neither power nor any rights other than those on which it depends to fulfil its sacred duties.

Now, in the Irish Republic, under the guise of “wise” lawmaking, under the guise of a “prudent” extension of the rule of law, the administration of one of its most precious sacraments is under threat, the sacrament of the reconciliation with God of men and women, burdened by the sins of their fallen nature. A law is being proposed to the Irish parliament, requiring Catholic priests to break the seal of confession, a privilege of the repentant sinner which has existed for the past 2000 years. By this law any priest to whom a penitent confesses a sin of sexual abuse of a minor – sins of murder, treason, drug-dealing and all the rest are not of the same gravity as this one sin, the law implies – will be obliged to report the sinner and his sin to the police. The proposed law will probably not fly anyway. Its inherent inconsistency, its impractability, its ignorance of the very procedure in the confessional –  where a confessor in principle does not identify the person confessing – will bring it down.

But the more serious implication lies in the very fact that it has been proposed. It is an interference by a secular state in the spiritual and sacramental mission of the Church, the very principle for which St. Thomas á Becket died.

A Catholic knows that when he talks to a priest in Confession, that priest to whom he is speaking is there in persona Christi. He comes to talk to him because he is truly sorry for sinning against God and his fellow men, because he fully repents and looks for grace to help him never to offend again. Under the law now being proposed in the Irish Republic, that confessor, in persona Christi, will leave that confessional and report what he has heard to the secular power. Forget contrition, forget penance, forget repentance – just go and take your punishment from the judges of the secular courts and from the tabloids and all who read them and are longing to drool voyeuristically over your sordid sins. Seek first the justice of your secular power. Forget the rest, it effectively says.

It is difficult not to see all this as part of a pattern, manifesting once again that endless battle between the temporal and the spiritual. The secular state of our day has taken from Christians their concept marriage and redefined it out of existence – first with divorce, and then with other aberrations. In Ireland it is now about to take the Catholic Sacrament of Reconciliation and destroy it with a penal law the like of which has not been seen since the 18^th century. There is a famous Irish ballad called The Croppy Boy. The boy in question, a young soldier in the Irish rebellion of 1798, came to the priest’s house for confession. The redcoats had got there before him and one of them, impersonating the priest, heard his confession in which he spilled all the beans of his rebellious life. When he had unburdened his soul the redcoat revealed his true identity.

With fiery glare and with fury hoarse,

Instead of a blessing he breathed a curse:

“Twas a good thought, boy, to come here and shrive,

For one short hour is your time to live.”

“Upon yon river three tenders float,

The priest’s in one – if he isn’t shot –

We hold this house for our lord and King,

And, Amen, say I, may all traitors swing!”

The boy in the song tells us his sins. There is nothing shocking about them. There is no mention of sexual abuse. It is just a story. But the shock of the song is that a man took the place of God in a sacred place, a man intervened and corrupted an act by which God has willed to bestow forgiveness and restore supernatural life to a repentant sinner. It is the very same shock which Catholics in Ireland experienced when their Prime Minister announced last week that the sacred seal of the Sacrament of Confession was going to be abolished under Irish law. The stand taken by Thomas á Becket is a stand for all time.

True peace  in the troubled Isles of the North at last? See http://www.mercatornet.com

John Waters has again generated a small hurricane of hostility with his column in The Irish Times this week. “The greatest ‘sin’ committed by Irish Catholicism was its failure to explain itself properly to the people. I have in mind not any recent reluctance to comply with demands for accountability or penitence, but something deeper: the failure to explain that Catholicism is fundamentally an understanding of human nature as it engages with reality, and that the ‘point’ is not social control, but personal self-understanding.”  It is a good article.

Perhaps something more of the transcendental might have figured in his analysis – and thus lift the vision beyond the earth-bound realm of the majority of those who responded to him in online comments. However, it did give our spiritually impoverished little society something to think about. What was, however, very saddening about it all was the unpleasantness and abusiveness of the tone and language of so many of those who objected to him. Would I like to spend much time in their company? I don’t think so.

Collectively it constituted something of an atheist-fest, where every brick-bat to hand was thrown at the Catholic Church which was now, by their common consensus, a fatally injured Leviathan in its last agony. Waters used the Catholic teaching on contraception as an illustration of what he saw as its failure to meet the challenge of giving its Irish flock a proper understanding of human nature as it engages with reality.

One respondent complained that he took the soft option by illustrating his point with the Catholic position on contraception as opposed to that on homosexual practices. Do they not understand that the Catholic position on both is rooted in the same integral view of the nature and purpose of human sexuality?

I couldn’t help connecting the tone of these forces arrayed against Waters with Michael Gerson’s comments in The Washington Post (Thursday, April 21) on the movie Atlas Shrugged, adapted from Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel by the same name. The movie, he said, perfectly reflects both the novel and the mind behind it.

Rand is a libertarian heroine. Her novels are described by Gerson as “vehicles for a system of thought known as Objectivism. Rand developed this philosophy at the length of Tolstoy, with the intellectual pretensions of Hegel, but it can be summarized on a napkin. Reason is everything. Religion is a fraud. Selfishness is a virtue. Altruism is a crime against human excellence. Self-sacrifice is weakness. Weakness is contemptible. ‘The Objectivist ethics, in essence,’ said Rand, ‘hold that man exists for his own sake, that the pursuit of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose, that he must not sacrifice himself to others, nor sacrifice others to himself.’”

When we probe the thought behind practically the entire army of atheist and militant secularists now ranged against religion in the world today – all religion – we essentially find this philosophy. They offer us a very bleak and shallow landscape – where we fearfully suspect that the land ruled by such a philosophy should be, as history has already shown us at such terrible cost, one where life would truly be “nasty, brutish and short”.

That this philosophy is juvenile and full of inherent contradictions would seem to guarantee it a short life. Strangely this is not happening. That it is not may be the result of that other phenomenon of the modern world which attracted some attention recently. Mankind seems to be caught in a trap of permanent adolescence.

Gerson tells us : “If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand’s achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne.”

Rand was virulently anti-Christian. The Cross, she said, is “the symbol of the sacrifice of the ideal to the nonideal. . . . It is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used. That is torture.” But the Cross is much more than a simple way of correcting our tendency to excess or a way of enhancing our happiness in the moment when we lay it down for a while. Even the secularist can understand it on that level. Hence the anger at John Waters’ suggestion that this is something for which they should acknowledge a debt to Christ or the Church.

Gerson says that many libertarians trace their inspiration to Rand’s novels, while sometimes distancing themselves from Objectivism. “But both libertarians and Objectivists are moved by the mania of a single idea — a freedom indistinguishable from selfishness.” Selfishness is a menace which at all times and in all places lurks in the shadow of our consciousness. But without religion, without that vision which shows us the Other which is the source of meaning for everything, the self and selfishness is all there is. That is when we are really in trouble.

They say this is a first. It may be, but it should not be a surprise. It is in fact a symptom of the chronic disconnect which is now commonplace between the key institutions in Western society – families, schools, government. About 70 teachers in a school in Lancashire, England, are on picket duty outside their school and are refusing to return because of a breakdown in school discipline. The Daily Telegraph (April 7) reports that staff at Darwen Vale High School in Darwen are angry over a lack of backing from the head and other management at the school when they confront unruly children.

Simon Jones, a local National Union of Teachers official manning the picket line, said: ”This is not a strike against pupils. It is about management, and management failure to support staff in dealing with challenging behaviour. No one wants to demonise the children here; they are no better or no worse than any other.” Pity the poor teachers, pity the poor pupils. In a broken society all are victims. Few know why and even fewer know what to do about it. This is by no means a “sink” school. In fact, in the latest report on the school from the Office of Standards in Education last June, Darwen Vale was rated a good school where pupils’ behaviour was given a good rating.

Something really terrible has happened when an entire body of teachers in a school has felt compelled to down tools and walk out of their classrooms because they find themselves no longer able to do that which should be second nature to them – relate humanly and affectionately to the body of students in that classroom. What the exact circumstances in Darwen Vale are may be special, but there is no doubt but that the reaction of those teachers is mirrored in thousands of classrooms around the Western world today where teachers feel they can no longer cope. Why? It is not a deficiency in their skills, or in their training, or in their good will. It is nothing less than a breakdown of civilised human behaviour.

What has happened has been happening for a long time and is deeply rooted in the culture of individualism which permeates Western society. A good and wise man – who died back in 2005 – diagnosed a good deal of this malaise in the course of his work for children and the American education system over the second half of the last century.

Urie Bronfenbrenner, born in Moscow to Jewish parents in 1917, came to

the United States at the age of six. After graduating from high school he received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1938, completing a double major in psychology and music. He went on to graduate work in developmental psychology, completing an M.A. degree at Harvard, followed by a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1942. After the Second World War he returned to Cornell where he remained for the rest of his professional life.

Bronfenbrenner’s observed that interpersonal relationships, even at the most basic level of  parent-child relationship, did not exist in a social vacuum but were embedded in the larger social structures of community, society, economics and politics. These, he maintained, hold the key to understanding our  current sad state of affairs. Already in the early 70s he pointed out in his book, Two Worlds of Childhood, how a chronic erosion of the basic processes of true human learning was taking place in the US as a result of rampant individualism. His study consisted of  a comparison between the broad educational culture of the US and the broad educational culture of the Soviet Union – and, strange as it may seem, it was in the US that the more worrying trends showed themselves.

In 1979 he wrote: “In the United States, it is now possible for a person eighteen years of age, female as well as male, to graduate from high school, college, or university without ever having cared for, or even held, a baby; without ever having comforted or assisted another human being who really needed help. . . . No society can long sustain itself unless its members have learned the sensitivities, motivations, and skills involved in assisting and caring for other human beings.” (The Ecology of Human Development)

In Two Worlds of Childhood he described how a self-inflicted generation gap in the US was cultivated had been through the constant separation of generations in that society’s relentless catering for generational tastes and interests, exclusive of each other. This led to the breakup of family life, the break-up of cross-generational community life, all with unforeseen but dire consequences.

“Children need people in order to become human”, he wrote. “It is primarily through observing, playing, and working with others older and younger than himself that a child discovers both what he can do and who he can become—that he develops both his ability and his identity…. Hence to relegate children to a world of their own is to deprive them of their humanity, and ourselves as well.” (Two Worlds of Childhood: U.S. and U.S.S.R., preface)

The civilizing effect of work and the life of work – not only on the person working but on all those sharing his or her life – was one of the casualties resulting from the segregation of society along generational lines which he saw all around him in the US in the ‘sixties and beyond. “One of the most significant effects of age-segregation in our society has been the isolation of children from the world of work. Whereas in the past children not only saw what their parents did for a living but even shared substantially in the task, many children nowadays have only a vague notion of the nature of the parent’s job, and have had little or no opportunity to observe the parent, or for that matter any other adult, when he is fully engaged in his work.” (Two Worlds of Childhood)

This was for him one of the consequences of a merciless imposition by society of pressures and priorities that allow neither time nor place for meaningful activities and relations between children and adults, which downgrade the role of parents and the functions of parenthood, and which prevent the parent from doing things he wants to do as a guide, friend, and companion to his children.

In a 1977 paper for the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation Conference on Parent Education, “Who Needs Parent Education?”, he pointed out a central fallacy in American thinking which he saw as leading to our present predicament. This is essentially the thinking which is at the heart of all individualism.

“Witness the American ideal: the Self-Made Man”, he said. “But there is no such person. If we can stand on our own two feet, it is because others have raised us up. If, as adults, we can lay claim to competence and compassion, it only means that other human beings have been willing and enabled to commit their competence and compassion to us—through infancy, childhood, and adolescence, right up to this very moment.”

The failure to recognise these essential needs of the child, he argued, manifested themselves in practical decisions by planners and policy makers. What was critically needed, he wrote in Two Worlds, in the planning and designing of new communities, housing projects, and urban renewal, both public and private, was that explicit consideration be given to the kind of world that is being created for the children who will be growing up in these settings. “Particular attention should be given to the opportunities which the environment presents or precludes for involvement of children with persons both older and younger than themselves.”

At the Flint conference he called for recognition of the need for re-education about the necessary and sufficient conditions for helping human beings to be truly human. They need to be re-educated not as parents—but as workers, neighbours, and friends; and as members of the organizations, committees, boards. The informal networks that control social institutions and thereby determine the conditions of life for families and children need to understand all this. There simply had to be, in his view, clear recognition that a child’s development occurs through a process of progressively more complex exchange between a child and somebody else—“especially somebody who’s crazy about that child”. The poor teachers, and the poor students, of Darwen Vale High School find themselves far removed from this beneficent and crazy love.

Urie Bronfenbrenner foresaw the crisis now being experienced by our society. “If”, he said, “the children and youth of a nation are afforded opportunity to develop their capacities to the fullest, if they are given the knowledge to understand the world and the wisdom to change it, then the prospects for the future are bright. In contrast, a society which neglects its children, however well it may function in other respects, risks eventual disorganization and demise.” Are we there yet? We can only hope not.

There was a piece of good news in Europe last week. It came from – of all places, some would say – the European Court of Human Rights. We didn’t read much about it in the newspapers but it was picked up by the ever-vigilant Iona Institute in Dublin.

The Court ruled that the 47 member-states of the Council of Europe are not violating anyone’s rights by displaying religious symbols like the crucifix in public places like the walls of State classrooms. The decision overturned a previous ruling by the same court in November 2009 when it found in favour of a Finnish woman living in Italy, Soile Lautsi, an atheist, who complained that her right to freedom of religion had been violated because her children were exposed to the crucifix in State schools.

The ruling means that those who, over the last few years, have banned religious symbols from public places, extending even cribs, can no longer look to the Convention for comfort. No-one’s rights are violated because they see a particular religious object in a public place, even if the public place is owned by the State. The argument, ‘I’m offended’, isn’t going to work anymore.

The decision caused uproar in Italy and was even condemned by parties that are traditionally anti-clerical. Twenty other countries as diverse as Norway and Greece joined Italy in condemning the decision and ten joined Italy’s appeal against the ruling.

On Friday, by a margin of 15 to 2 the Grand Chamber of the Court found that the initial decision was flawed. It held that member-states should be free to decide these matters themselves, meaning it fell within their “margin of appreciation”. It held that displaying the crucifix did not in itself amount to “indoctrination”.

The Court declared: “There is no evidence before the Court that the display of a religious symbol on classroom walls may have an influence on pupils and so it cannot reasonably be asserted that it does or does not have an effect on young persons whose convictions are still in the process of being formed.

“[I]t is true that by prescribing the presence of crucifixes in State-school classrooms – a sign which, whether or not it is accorded in addition a secular symbolic value, undoubtedly refers to Christianity – the regulations confer on the country’s majority religion preponderant visibility in the school environment.

“That is not in itself sufficient, however, to denote a process of indoctrination on the respondent State’s part and establish a breach of the requirements of Article 2 of Protocol No. 1.”

It held that, when dealing with sensitive cultural and religious issues, States who are members of the Council of Europe have “a wide margin of appreciation”. The Grand Chamber rejected the original ECHR finding that the Crucifixes represented “powerful external symbols” which unduly influence pupils. It held that, “the decision whether or not to perpetuate a tradition falls in principle within the margin of appreciation of the respondent State”. It added: “The Court must moreover take into account the fact that Europe is marked by a great diversity between the States of which it is composed, particularly in the sphere of cultural and historical development.

The decision recognised State sovereignty in this area, and accepted that States are allowed to give recognition to the majority religion of the State and to their national and cultural heritage, meaning in the case of a country like Italy, Poland or Ireland, Christianity.