The mental gymnastics of mental reservation

The depravity of a large number of priests, supposed beacons of moral rectitude and figures of trust within the community, is now an established fact. These individuals are a few bad apples, some will say. Perhaps many of them did act alone, although the case of the deaf and dumb boy in Italy, abused by sixteen different priests, does raise horrible questions of criminal conspiracy.

Excuses are often couched in clichés, but let’s take the apple analogy a bit further. These bad apples were not just bobbing around in fetid corners of society, independently rotting and infecting their locality. They were bound within the bosom – the strongly hooped barrel, if you will – of the Catholic Church, which went to some trouble to both conceal their crimes and protect them from outside enquiry.

We should not of course be surprised that people of faith resist enquiry, since enquiry is driven by reason and is no respecter of dogma or doctrine. We should also not be surprised that people of faith are capable of duplicity. After all, why should believing in things that are patently untrue make you more honest than your neighbour? If anything, a mind used to deceiving itself may be more likely to deceive others, so complacent has it become over questions of truth.

What is surprising is that there is a special term for the duplicity condoned by the Church: mental reservation. The following is from Michael Nugent’s piece (accessed 16.09.11) on what the Cloyne Report had to say about Bishop Magee:

The lying, deliberately misleading and unethical behaviour exposed in the Cloyne report must be seen alongside the previous revelation that Archbishop Desmond Connell of Dublin was happy to knowingly mislead people by a process that he described as ‘mental reservation’. As Connell explained in 2009, “There may be circumstances in which you can use an ambiguous expression realising that the person who you are talking to will accept an untrue version of whatever it may be.” Indeed, the Cloyne Report [21.20] refers to two accounts of the same meeting having different end times, and suggests that “It may be that that time difference was also of some assistance in performing the mental gymnastics of mental reservation in the manner of recording the details of the meeting.”

The Irish Catholic Hierarchy of course tells the truth about many things (which is a pretty low hurdle for ethical behaviour), but it is unsafe to assume that telling the truth is their default position, without further corroboration, in cases where it is in their interests to mislead us. Even if they insist that they are not lying or misleading us, they might be lying or misleading us when they say that. Or they might be practicing ‘mental reservation’. Based on their record whenever they have been independently investigated about dealing with child sexual abuse, that is the most prudent default position to take.

In going about our daily business, we expect people to communicate as best they can, and we cut them some slack if they don’t achieve perfect lucidity. Who hasn’t had difficulty saying precisely what they meant to say? We’re all vaguely aware of just how quirky language can be:

• The bishop was drunk.
• The water was drunk.

This pair of sentences (from Thouless and Thouless 2011, p. 16) illustrates the kind of ambiguity that we usually try to avoid or clear up in conversation. We normally engage in acts of communication in good faith (and atheists have no problem with this sense of faith, a word that is itself multiply ambiguous), and so it is surprising that people of faith deliberately seek to create ambiguity. One clue as to why this might be the case is contained in a later remark of Thouless and Thouless (p. 28):

We can only hope to settle a question of fact by using observations or research to discover what is really the case. Then we have to use words to convey the case to other people as clearly and unambiguously as we can.

Ultimately, of course, people of faith have settled questions of fact about their religious beliefs by faith, not by “observations or research”, so why should they worry overmuch about ambiguity?