Aspects of our history, which have recently come to light in several provinces of the congregation, have forced us to reflect on our own sinful history in a way that has been traumatic, painful and very public. In preparation for the Spirituality Conference of 1982, Regis Hickey invited all provinces of the congregation to write about their sinful history. Ironically, the tragedy of child sexual abuse was never mentioned in any of these province reports. It was as if there was nothing to declare on this score. How things have changed in the intervening years!

Now we know what it feels like to be publicly branded as sinners, to feel unclean, to feel rejected, to experience in our innermost souls the anguish of being associated with a sin that is totally at odds with the very essence of what we stand for – the nurturance and the development of young people. All at once, our integrity as trustworthy ministers of the gospel was called into question, and we experienced what it is like to be numbered among the wicked, with the name of our sin branded on our foreheads.

The most natural response to all of this is a deep anger, a sense of outrage even, at what we see as the gross injustice of much of what has happened. What are the sources of our anger? We are angry at:

- those genuine complainants who have chosen to expose the congregation to public ignominy because of the boiling rage within themselves at what was done to them;

- the media, many of whose agents have been without scruple in their willingness to tailor the facts to suit a pre-determined agenda of their own;

- our institutional structures from the past which, in the light of all that has happened, have been shown to be so inadequate – inadequate formation programmes, oppressive regimes, uncritical promotion of the activism to the detriment of the life of the spirit, in short, a congregational life that was not reflected upon in any critical or evaluative sense;

- the thousands of our past pupils who have been well served by our schools and institutions and who have maintained a significant silence in the face of our public humiliation;

- those of our members whom we adjudge responsible for getting us into this mess without a thought for the fact that they themselves may have been victims on one kind or another;

- those complainants who have made unfounded allegations in the hope of financial reward;

- ourselves because of our sense of hopelessness and inability to change the flow of events that have been so destructive and damaging.

Anger is a powerful source of motivation, a powerful source of energy for action. Anger can be our friend, but it can also be a very destructive enemy, corrosive of everything we do. I remember the crushing sense of outrage I felt when a School Board refused to accept the nomination of a Brother to a position on the school staff because his predecessor had been guilty of abusive behaviour of a pupil. The Brother rejected by the Board was an excellent Brother in every way with an unblemished record and a wonderful capacity to engage with young people. He was rejected simply because he was a Brother, and because a confrere of his had proved untrustworthy. My sense of outrage lasted for a long, long time, because I experienced it as a rejection, not of an individual Brother, but as the rejection of the entire cohort of Brothers who had maintained that school for over a hundred years, indeed a rejection of the congregation itself. I mention this just to illustrate how our anger can be stirred and how life’s events scar us and leave us with a gratuitous legacy of wounds that we cannot, we dare not ignore.

Anger must be recognised and managed. There is no healthy living for us unless there is healthy management of our anger. It is so easy for our anger to run loose and destroy – both others and ourselves. Today’s world is full of blind, and raging anger enveloping nations and peoples with deadly consequences for all of life.

The purpose of these few lines is not to write a critical expose of anger. There are professionals who dedicate their expertise to analysing and dealing with human anger. The purpose of these few lines is to highlight the need for us to deal with our traumas and hurts in a positive way. How we deal with the wounds of life is the real challenge. Are they instruments of grace for us, or are they the weapons of our destruction?

We cannot do much to change circumstances which are outside of our control and which bring upon us much pain, but we can determine our attitudes. We are free to allow our wounds to fester within us, paralysing the life of the Spirit and goading us into vengeful retaliations, or hardhearted unforgiving ways. We can pursue the forbidden fruit of revenge. But we must remember that although revenge is pleasing to the palate, it is poisonous to all that is of God within us, because it destroys our God-like capacity to love our neighbour as ourselves.

On the other hand, we can chose to search for God’s message in what has happened, horrible and all as it may have been, and discover the redemptive moment within it. Even the most destructive events conceal within them these precious redemptive moments. If they do not offer us the possibility of redemption, then Calvary was in vain, and our pain and our misery are a meaningless desecration of our lives.