by Brian Devlin

It’s over ten years since Cardinal Keith O’Brien, once the UK’s most senior Catholic, was named in the UK press and worldwide as a sexual predator and hypocrite. As one of the whistleblower priests who took our story to Catherine Deveney and The Observer newspaper, I have been utterly fascinated to reflect on what that episode meant to the Catholic Church and Scottish society.

I wrote about my experiences in a book called Cardinal Sin: Challenging Power Abuse in the Catholic Church. The impact of the book has surprised me and exceeded my expectations in many ways. But it has also taught me some harsh lessons about the organisation that I gave my young life to.

I didn’t tell my 92-year-old Irish mum I had written the book until two days before it was published. Her reaction was a yardstick to many of the responses I was to experience.

‘Ahh, Brian’, she said. ‘You check the brakes of your car every morning now before you drive it’.  My mum’s response was to be afraid for her son. This was the archetypal little old Catholic lady who trusted the Church all her life but who now sees part of it as though it was closer to a mafia crime gang than a beatitudinal vision of Jesus. She, and very many like her, have been sickened by the corruption and malfeasance seeping through the pores of the Church. I know, and she knows, it’s not all like that. Far from it. But much of it is.  And that is a problem.

Brian Devlin is author of ‘Cardinal Sin: Challenging Power Abuse in the Catholic Church (Columba Press).

Doing theology and theological ethics will be reviewed in the next edition of Open House.