Focus: Cardinal Sins

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The confessional symbolises what sets the Roman Catholic Church apart from the modern world. In an age of open government, open hearts and open season as celebrities and nonentities alike reveal the most private details of their lives, it offers a unique guarantee of secrecy. Behind its velvet curtain or wooden door, you can unburden yourself to God, via a priest, sure that confidentiality will be be respected. Priests have gone to prison rather than reveal what has been said to them. Moreover, your sins will be forgiven. We live at a time where forgiveness is seen as weakness, yet in the confessional even the most heinous of sins can potentially be forgiven and wiped clean in the belief that, with God's strength, they will not be repeated.

This potential for redemption is for many Catholics one of the most attractive aspects of the faith. Numbers going to confession may be dropping (the problem is that often what the church deems a sin – using a condom, for instance – most Catholics don't) but, when it gets to serious matters, the sacrament of reconciliation, as it is now called, retains appeal.

For outsiders, though, it can seem all too easy. So you just drop in for a chat with a priest, admit to a murder or two, say a few prayers and all is fine again, non-Catholic friends ask quizzically. It hardly measures up to their benchmarks of justice, but confession, I try to explain, is not that simple. It's more than a chat – even though some modern priests have dropped the trappings and prefer a face-to-face over the kitchen table – because there is a third party involved, ie God. And remorse and contrition are necessary, while absolution – cleansing from sin – can be refused.

Those conflicting views about confession go to the heart of Catholicism's current crisis over paedophile priests, and may explain what are otherwise inexplicable and shameful actions by the church authorities. First there is secrecy. In the context of the confessional it is, I would argue, a positive thing; but extend that velvet curtain over every aspect of the internal workings of the church and you create a dangerous philosophy.

To take an example: deep in the heart of the Vatican is a wonderful series of rooms called the Secret Archives. When I was researching a book, I was allowed to visit them and admire the vast, ornate rosewood cupboards that contain ... well, I don't know what they contain, because, having been invited in, I wasn't allowed to look inside. It was secret.

If the church's secrecy about its own past infuriates historians, then its current habit of making decisions in secret that affect the lives of today's billion Catholics worldwide without even the semblance of consultation can bemuse even its most faithful members. Worse, when problems arise because of those very decisions, the church's instinctive reaction is to sweep everything under the carpet for fear of damaging the institution. It always comes first, so there can be no debate about, say, the benefits of condoms in preventing the spread of Aids. The church's greatest triumph, you sometimes end up deciding, is regarded in official circles as having lasted for 2,000 years. That is the thing that has to be prolonged at all costs. And the culture of secrecy that thrives at the expense of individuals is the price Catholics have to pay. Yet – and this is where the cardinals in apostolic palaces seem most out of touch – the church is surely first and foremost a body about individuals. Lose their loyalty and it is an ancient but hollow shell.

And so, when confronted with the appalling truth that paedophile priests have been raping children, cardinals and bishops around the world have for years believed that the institution is better served by moving the offenders to other parishes, paying for the victims' silence (or even simply refusing to give their account credence) and shutting the velvet curtain tighter. In an authoritarian, hierarchical structure where the priesthood was – and to a large extent still is – considered an élite, to face up to such accusations publicly ran too great a risk of destroying the good name of the clerical caste and by association the church. Yet as the truth has slowly and painfully emerged over the past 20 years, the policy of secrecy has produced precisely the same effect. And it has compounded it by making the institution seem callous and unfeeling over the trauma of innocent children.

It may seem straightforward to condemn absolutely such past actions, but the church also needs to understand them if it is ever to restore confidence in its mission. How can this cover-up be described, as it was last week by Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, as "trying to take the right and best course of action"? This is where that second feature of the confessional comes in: forgiveness. When the abusive priest sat before his bishop, he would most likely have expressed remorse, told of his struggle to conquer his demons, and begged for forgiveness. And in a church founded on the example of a man who absolved even those who killed Him, forgiveness is a principal and distinctive virtue.

Pope John Paul II is keen on describing the church as a "sign of contradiction" in the secular culture. Talk of forgiveness certainly sits uneasily with the modern obsession with vengeance that pervades every courtroom and death row. Yet forgiveness for the church stands at the core of a whole cycle that begins with sin, invokes divine love and triumphs with redemption. If the Catholic authorities mistakenly underestimated the seriousness of the paedophile activities, as they have claimed, what they really mean is that they believed that, as in the confessional, those sins could be offered up to God in confidence, absolved, and redemption could begin.

There are two problems with that attitude. One is that the process of redemption patently did not begin with many of the individuals concerned. They just went out and did it again and again. The second is that it is hard when you are busy showing forgiveness to your fellow priests, and allowing them just one more chance to show you that they really have reformed, to give adequate weight to the victims. Any judicial system has to balance the needs of perpetrators and victims and the church's became hopelessly one-sided.

Focusing on the priestly perpetrators brings us to another unattractive side of the scandal: paying off victims. It was compensation; it was to bring them within that curtain of secrecy; but it was also to create a space where forgiveness could flourish. Had the cases gone straight to the police and to the courts, as they should have and will now under new guidelines produced by Lord Nolan, secular ideas of justice would have given short shrift to considerations of redemption. It is to Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's credit that he has tried, by appointing Nolan to revise ecclesiastical procedures in dealing with paedophile priests, to shift the balance of the church's concern decisively away from perpetrators to victims. He was, it might be argued, trying to inch the church towards some kind of redemption. Yet quite how he conveys that in the current climate of outrage is almost impossible to imagine.

Nicholas Pyke, Andrew Gumbel in America, and Kathy Marks in Australia

Clerical child abuse is a world-wide problem. It is most serious of all in America, where there are 400 complaints against priests lodged in Boston alone. The country's most senior cardinal, Archbishop Bernard Law, has come under pressure to resign after admitting moving a priest to another parish despite suspicion that he was guilty of abuse. Now the leader of the Catholic Church in Britain, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, has also come under fire after the conviction of a priest for child abuse. Last week Father Michael Hill was sentenced to a further five years in prison for abusing three more children. He had already been jailed for similar offences. Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor, formerly bishop of the Arundel and Brighton diocese, apologised for the decision to give protection to Father Hill, rather than the children in his care.

The Hill case followed that of Father John Lloyd, sacked by Pope John Paul II for raping a 16-year-old girl and abusing two altar boys, and Father Joe Jordan, jailed for eight years for child abuse, whose case led to the Archbishop of Cardiff being forced to retire. The biggest source of scandal has been the diocese of Birmingham, most notoriously in the case of two priests, Eric Taylor and Sam Penny, from a children's home in Coleshill, Warwickshire.

In the face of such criticism the church has made all the right noises. It commissioned an independent inquiry from Lord Nolan, whose report, published in 2000, provided for a national database to vet candidates for the priesthood and a national child protection office. But the continuing stream of allegations has left even Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor's supporters concerned he may now be damaged goods.

"As Bishop of Arundel and Brighton, he made very serious mistakes of judgement," says John Wilkins, editor of the influential Catholic weekly The Tablet. "Without doubt his moral authority has been damaged."

Victims are unconvinced the church is truly penitent. "The way they cover up for each other, and keep up this business of moving priests from one parish to another, is what a good priest described to me as 'satanic arrogance'," said one. "They have no fear of God, these people."

In America, bishops have angered the laity with their refusal to take action or co-operate with civilian authorities. Victims have come forward only to see the church hierarchy shield abusive priests. Now the church is to set up its own courts to hear cases behind closed doors. According to one poll, one in five American Catholics has stopped contributing to the church because of child abuse.

Australia has experienced similar scandals, and millions of dollars have been paid out in compensation to victims. The church has also responded with advertisements expressing regret about its failure to deal swiftly with the problem.

For all its high-profile commissions and reports into the issue, the church in this country appears uncertain how to respond in public. Opinion seems to be split, for example, as to whether the cardinal should wait for the latest controversy to die away, or come out and explain himself on television.

Baroness Shirley Williams, the Liberal Democrat peer and one of Britain's leading Catholics, believes the church's very existence is threatened

"The church has simply relied on a world that is past," she said yesterday. "Unless it addresses the world that is, it will simply become a sect of people cut off from its society.

"The church has got to go through a new reformation. The sad thing is, it's unlikely to."