There have been times over this past week when I have momentarily thought that maybe, just maybe the Vatican was finally being forced to confront the truth about the reality of clerical sexual abuse and the cover up it perpetrated of such heinous crimes by clergy.

I admit I remained sceptical as I read about how the tone of comments emanating from the Vatican seemed to suggest a significant shift in thinking and approach, but I demanded of myself that I remained open to the possibility, no matter how remote, that change was possible.

In what seemed a very significant development just a few days ago, Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi acknowledged that the Church had lost public trust and said Church law could no longer be placed above civil laws if that trust were to be recovered.

Then today the Vatican published an explanation of its guidelines to Bishops on how cases of clerical sexual abuse should be handled. Notably, the Vatican said that Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed. On closer examination though this latest ‘explanation’ of church guidelines isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

The guidelines do not in fact say that Bishops must report all cases of actual or suspected clerical child sexual abuse to the civil authorities.  Instead they say that “Civil law concerning reporting of crimes to the appropriate authorities should always be followed.”

However in many jurisdictions there is no mandatory reporting requirement. So in a great many cases civil law will not require bishops to report abuse concerns to the civil authorities for proper investigation. Just these past few weeks the most senior Catholic Bishop in Denmark made it clear that there was no requirement under Danish law which obliged him to refer cases to the police. In Ireland there is no mandatory reporting law and the same is true in many other countries. Ireland knows only to well the cost of allowing Bishops to decide when and if they should refer cases to the police.  The reality is that many, many cases of rape and abuse by Irish priests were not referred to the police and social services and on numerous occasions Bishops did not fully cooperate with police investigations into abuse by priests.

In 1996 the Irish church did introduce guidelines which required bishops to refer cases to the civil authorities. But they did not do so in most cases.

Explaining his failure to so so the former Archbishop of Dublin Cardinal Desmond Connell simply asserted that he was not required to follow the guidelines as they were not enforceable under either Canon (Church) or Civil Law.

So much for guidelines.

Also, the procedures and guidelines published by the Vatican today are by no means emphatic in requiring that child protection be at the heart of responses to clerical child abuse. For instance they state “the bishop mayimpose precautionary measures to safeguard the community, including the victims.”

So the Bishop may, presumably if he is so inclined, impose measures designed to safeguard children and respond to the needs of victims. But he is by no means required to do so.

The simple fact remains that Church Law does not require Bishops to even consider child protection and victim welfare in deciding to respond to child sexual abuse by priests, but it does require that they consider as crucial the reputation and good of the church, even if that is contrary to the greater good. That approach is proven in case after case right across the world where Pope’s, Cardinals, Bishops et al ignored the rights and needs of children, abuse victims, catholic communities and the common good and acted instead to protect their power, their authority and their wealth.

So why would we ever trust such men to act now to protect children? Where is the evidence of the epiphany, the moment when they woke up and realised that their first obligation was to truth, justice and the common good?  Where is there proof of the road to Damascus conversion where the men who have so consistently lied about their knowledge of clerical paedophilia and its cover up suddenly realised that they had gotten it all terribly wrong?

I can see no evidence of it, none, not a jot.

The publication of the guidelines themselves suggests the very opposite.

At one point in a section dealing with how the Vatican might deal with abusing clerics the guidelines read, “The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) also brings to the Holy Father requests by accused priests who, cognizant of their crimes, ask to be dispensed from the obligation of the priesthood and want to return to the lay state.  The Holy Father grants these requests for the good of the Church (“pro bono Ecclesiae”).”

But if is this is the case then how in God’s name can the current Pope justify his more than six year delay in agreeing to defrock a priest who had asked to be laicized after he was convicted of tying up and sexually assaulting two boys? I dealt with this case in an earlier post.

AP published a letter which seems to show that the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger resisted pleas from a US Diocese to defrock a California-based priest who had sexually assaulting children, citing concerns including ‘the good of the universal church’. The Priest himself had asked to be defrocked after he was convicted of tying up and sexually assaulting two boys.

The request to the Vatican to defrock the priest was first made by the in 1981.  In 1982, Oakland bishop John Cummins urged Ratzinger, as head of the Vatican’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith, to grant the request. Nothing much appears to have happened until Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to Bishop Cummins that although the argument for defrocking Kiesle was of “grave significance”, it was necessary “to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time”.

The letter also notes the “detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly considering the young age”. Another priest, George Mockel, wrote to Cummins: “My own reading of this letter is that basically they are going to sit on it until Steve gets quite a bit older,” reported AP.

The priest, Father Stephen Kiesle, was 38 at the time.

Once again the primary concern of the Vatican appears to have been its reputation and the prevention of scandal, with scant or no regard for child protection or victims of abuse. The letter signed by the man who would become the current Pope clearly establishes that the Vatican resisted defrocking the convicted paedophile priest for the “good of the universal Church”.

The Priest was finally defrocked in 1987, having spent a number of years after his conviction for sexual assaults on children working with young people within the church.

The Vatican stridently defended the Pope’s handling of this case over the weekend and then published these guidelines today without even appearing to understand the perverse contradiction in suggesting that they provide for a proper response to child protection concerns when they clearly allow grossly negligent handling of cases which should give rise to terribly grave concerns.

And then tonight, just to top it all, the Popes second in command Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Vatican Secretary of State, said that homosexuality is the cause of paedophilia.

Speaking at a press conference in Chile he rejected the notion that celibacy has any part to play in the sex abuse scandals. He may well be right that celibacy itself is not directly a causative factor, after all men who are struggling to stay celibate can and do chose to have adult sexual relationships, they are surely more likely to do that than rape a child to satisfy their normal sexual urges?

But to suggest that homosexuality is to blame for paedophilia is deceitful and vile. To blame an already marginalised section of society for the crimes of child rapists is a contemptible act which further reinforces homophobia and hatred and grants permission to bigotry and violence.

It is also a blatant deceit. It is true that the majority of victims of abusing priests are male children and teenagers. But by no means are all.  And even so, we don’t describe sexual offenders who target girl children as heterosexual offenders, we describe them as paedophiles. The gender of the victim does not make the abuse either heterosexual or homosexual and many abusers target children of both sexes.

For instance one of Ireland’s most notorious offenders Fr Brendan Smyth abused mainly girls. Fr Oliver O’Grady whose offending was the basis of the Oscar nominated film Deliver us from Evil abused both girls and boys as did countless other clerical rapists.

What has Cardinal Bertone got to say to their victims and the countless thousands of other female victims of priestly rapists across the world? Is the reality of their experiences to be denied and covered up in yet another attempt to whitewash the truth and spin the facts in to deflect blame from the Vatican onto others?

Not much I would imagine, after all truth, justice and basic human decency doesn’t appear to matter much to Bertone and his fellow church leaders.

And where are those of integrity within the Church to challenge such hateful claptrap? For months now we have heard that Cardinal Sean Brady is a man of integrity and purpose who truly wishes to deal with the abuse issue effectively. We hear the same mantra about other Bishops here in Ireland, in the UK and in other places.

Well let’s see them prove it.

Lets hear them unequivocally reject Cardinal Bertone’s vile attempt to further stigmatize gay people and deny the institutional failings of the Roman Catholic Church.

If they don’t, then we know what they really stand for.

The last twenty four hours have seen further dramatic developments in relation to the Roman Catholic Church and its management of child sexual abuse by its priests.

Last night Associated Press revealed yet another case which raises questions about Pope Benedict XVI’s involvement in the management of paedophile priests. AP published a letter which seems to show that the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger resisted pleas from a US Diocese to defrock a California-based priest who had sexually assaulting children, citing concerns including ‘the good of the universal church’. The Priest himself had asked to be defrocked after he was convicted of tying up and sexually assaulting two boys.

The request to the Vatican to defrock the priest was first made by the in 1981.  In 1982, Oakland bishop John Cummins urged Ratzinger, as head of the Vatican’s congregation for the doctrine of the faith, to grant the request. Nothing much appears to have happened until Cardinal Ratzinger wrote to Bishop Cummins that although the argument for defrocking Kiesle was of “grave significance”, it was necessary “to submit incidents of this sort to very careful consideration, which necessitates a longer period of time”.

The letter also notes the “detriment that granting the dispensation can provoke within the community of Christ’s faithful, particularly considering the young age”. Another priest, George Mockel, wrote to Cummins: “My own reading of this letter is that basically they are going to sit on it until Steve gets quite a bit older,” reported AP.

The priest, Father Stephen Kiesle, was 38 at the time.

Once again the primary concern of the Vatican appears to have been its reputation and the prevention of scandal, with scant or no regard for child protection or victims of abuse. The letter signed by the man who would become the current Pope clearly establishes that the Vatican resisted defrocking the convicted paedophile priest for the “good of the universal Church”.

The Priest was finally defrocked in 1987, having spent a number of years after his conviction for sexual assaults on children working with young people within the church.

This is the fourth case to emerge which raises very serious questions about the handling of clerical sexual abuse cases by Pope Benedict XVI.

• In 1980 as archbishop of Munich and Freising, then Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger approved housing for a priest accused of child abuse. The Priest was subsequently allowed to return to ministry with the knowledge of Joseph Ratzinger and despite explicit psychiatric advice that he posed a threat to children.
• Cardinal Ratzinger failed to act over complaints during the 1990s about US priest Lawrence Murphy, who abused over 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin
• Cardinal Ratzinger allowed a case against Arizona priest Michael Teta to languish at the Vatican for more than a decade despite repeated pleas for his removal
• Cardinal Ratzinger resisted the defrocking of California priest Stephen Kiesle, a convicted offender, saying “good of the universal Church” needed to be considered.

The Vatican has robustly defended the Pope. But their defence has been both ridiculous and, at times, deeply insulting.

The Pope dismissed questions about his mismanagement of clerical sexual abuse as “petty gossip”, a phrase repeated by former Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Sodano at an Easter Mass in the Vatican.

The Popes personal preacher also provoked public outrage when he likened the challenges put to the Pope with the “more shameful aspects of anti-semitism.” The Vatican moved to distance itself from those comments, made at a mass in front of Pope Benedict. Their attempts were very much undermined when the sermon was published in full on the front page of Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.

Then just when one might have thought the Vatican had made every gaffe it was possible to make in defending the indefensible they managed to prove us wrong.

The Vatican came out all guns blazing and claimed that accusations that the Pope helped cover up the actions of paedophile priests are part of an anti-Catholic “hate” campaign targeting the pope for his opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage.

You couldn’t make it up.

But it appears that chinks are finally showing in the Vatican’s rapidly rusting armour.

In a very significant development, Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi acknowledged that the Church had lost public trust and said Church law could no longer be placed above civil laws if that trust were to be recovered.

This represents a radical shift in both tone and approach by the Vatican. It acknowledges two things.

Firstly the Vatican appears to have finally acknowledged that Church, or Canon, Law has been placed above the rule of Civil Law up until this point, effectively meaning that the Church response to clerical sexual abuse was dictated by a code not remotely concerned with child protection, but designed to protect the Church and its clergy. Secondly it is the first time that the Vatican has acknowledged that this is a significant problem, and that it needs to change.

If this is the case it is a very welcome development indeed.

Earlier this week it was reported that the Vatican was urging Bishops to cooperate with civil authorities in sex abuse cases involving clergy, but this is not yet truly the case as evidenced bu recent comments made in an interview by the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, Brazilian Cardinal Claudio Hummes.

He said that instances of sexual abuse by priests were “criminal facts” as well as serious sins, and require cooperation with the civil justice system.

“Once the evil deed has been objectively proven, one must resolutely pursue (the case) to the very end by also turning to ordinary justice,” he said.

The worrying part of his comments is the use of the words “once the evil deed has been objectively proven”. This makes it clear that the Cardinal, head of an important Vatican Department, believes that cases should not be reported to civil authorities until they have first been investigated by church officials. It is simply not credible to believe that the very institution which has been proven to be so negligent in the past can be allowed to investigate cases of clerical abuse and be allowed to decide if they need to be notified to the relevant civil authorities.

If the Vatican is to prove that it is serious about dealing with its past failures it must act to introduce clear and enforceable church law which requires that all cases which raise child protection concerns relating to the conduct of clergy be reported to the civil authorities.

Of course it has quite correctly been pointed out that there are jurisdictions where the civil authorities may not be sufficiently developed to properly address child sex abuse or where reporting could place the lives of both the victim and perpetrator in danger. In such cases the Vatican must refer to an external, independent body to ensure that any victims are properly supported and any perpetrator dealt with effectively.

Global church law which places children’s rights and child protection at the heart of the response to any future concerns about abusing clergy is what’s needed.

And as I have said repeatedly over the past number of years, the one man who can act to make that happen is Pope Benedict XVI.

Until and unless he does so, Vatican protestations that he is serious about dealing properly with clerical sexual abuse will be utterly meaningless.

I had a call from Sinead O’Connor last night who wanted to communicate her own strong sense of outrage at the call from Bishop of Ferns, Dr Dennis Brennan for parishioners to donate money to meet the financial costs of that diocese’s negligence in dealing with clerical child sexual abuse.

Here is what Sinead wanted to say:

“Please allow me to express my astonishment upon reading the statement made on the evening of March 1st by the bishop of Ferns, Denis Brennan.

His statement attempts to dictate to us in the same way the inquisition did, how christians should behave. Saying directly that it would be anti-christian of us to feel the church should pay its own bills for its own abuse with its own billions which it throttled from our grandparents, whom they also abused, physically, emotionally, psychologically and sexually.

Evidence of sexual abuse by clergy, according to the murphy report, can be traced as far back as 320 a.d. and the first treatment centres for paedophile priests were created in 1940, named servants of the Paracletes. These centres were opened all over the world.

I would like to know  exactly whose idea this plan was, and from where were issued the instructions or permission to make such a statement.

The statement and its attempted manipulation of good catholic people could be described as unbelievable, stupid, comical. But in my opinion the only word that does it justice is evil.

How long do they expect us to restrain ourselves?

We have put up with this bull dung for hundreds of years.

A true christian is someone who, in any given situation is supposed to ask themselves what would Jesus do, and try to do that.

How an organisation which has acted  decade after decade only to protect its business interests above the interests of children, can feel it has the right to dictate to us what christian should do is beyond belief.

From the Pope on down through the vatican  and through therefore, the lower echelons (spelling?)  the whole organisation in my belief is in fact utterly anti-christian. and evil. As proven by centuries of torture, bloodshed, burnings, terrorism, and coverings up of “the worst crime” known to man.

And if Jesus christ is to be seen in the vulnerable of this world then all they have done is crucify the man over and over and over again.

If Christ was here, he would be burning down the vatican. and I for one would be helping him.

sinead o; connor.

An opinion piece first published in the Irish Daily Mail on Jan 20th 2010

To find out more or to support Amnesty International click here.

On the 22^nd of July 2002 a Gulfstream jet, registration number N379P, landed at Shannon Airport. It was owned by Premier Executive Transport Service, a front company operated by the CIA. Its crew overnighted in Shannon and flew out to Washington the next day, no doubt well rested.

This was not a normal stop over, like hundreds that take place every day at Shannon, this was a getaway.

A few months before this a young man called Binyam Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan at Karachi Airport. He was handed over to US custody and the CIA sent this jet to pick him up. It flew him to Morocco, where he was held in a secret detention centre for 18 months and brutally tortured, before flying home through Shannon.

“I tried to put on a brave face,” he said later. “But maybe I was going to be raped. Maybe they’d electrocute me. Maybe castrate me. They took a razor to my right chest. It was only a small cut. Maybe an inch. Then they cut my left chest.

“One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction. I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.”

Eventually Binyam would end up in Guantánamo. Last February he was released after a total of nearly nine years in detention. He was never convicted of any crime.

‘Extraordinary rendition’ is one of those phrases like collateral damage that tries to hide what it is by sounding like something official, something legitimate but it is not.

It actually means CIA agents kidnap people in one country, sometimes using others to do their dirty work, and then secretly smuggle them to another country where they are generally held in secret. Once there they are interrogated, often tortured, either on the direct instructions or with the active participation of members of British and American intelligence.

While Guantánamo and renditions are the responsibility of the US, other countries made it possible. They allowed people to be transferred through their airports, took part in illegal detentions and kidnapping or, as in Ireland’s case, they allowed their territory to be used as a staging area for rendition operations.

The Irish Government says that no prisoners have ever been transported through Irish airspace. It knows this because President Bush says so. As our then Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, put it in 2006, “I looked at the great President Bush and said to him, I wanted to be sure, to be sure, and he assured me”.

I doubt many were as convinced. The British Government was given the same assurances Bertie was. They were told prisoners were not being transferred through their territory. However in 2008 the US Government admitted that planes carrying prisoners had landed at a British air base on at least two occasions.

The simple fact is this. We don’t know whether the CIA has transported boys and men through Shannon Airport to be imprisoned and tortured elsewhere. Neither does the Irish Government. No one knows because suspected rendition flights are not searched by the Gardaí. Planes known to be involved in kidnapping boys and men have routinely used our airspace and airports but we are told that checks are not necessary. Imagine if planes known to be involved in drug smuggling were passing through Shannon and the Gardaí didn’t inspect them?

What we do know, and what we can say for certain, is that Shannon Airport was used as a launching pad for four rendition operations involving the kidnappings of at least four people, Abu Omar, Khaled al Maqtari, Khaled el Masri and Binyam Mohamed. We have the dates and the flight logs to prove it.

Yet the Irish Government has consistently refused to address the issue and seems uninterested in whether CIA agents were breaking the law while flying through Shannon Airport.

For some people, this is all in the past, the legacy of the Bush administration and its so-called ‘war on terror’. There is a widespread belief that President Obama ended the practice of renditions but this is not the case.

One year ago President Obama signed an order to close Guantánamo Bay and to end the CIA’s programme of long-term secret detention. But he did not end extraordinary rendition.

So is Ireland still being used as a stop over for the CIA? We don’t know. But we do know that suspect planes are still using Shannon.

Only last month human rights activists monitoring planes landing at Shannon announced they have identified five planes that were previously involved in renditions operations using Shannon since March of last year, some of them on multiple occasions.

The UN Human Rights Committee, the Irish Human Rights Commission and the Council of Europe have all called on the Irish Government to inspect suspect flights using Shannon Airport.

In November 2008 the Government responded to growing public pressure by setting up a Cabinet committee to review the law and ensure Gardaí had the power to board and search suspected rendition flights.

Green Party TD Ciarán Cuffe said at the time that, “This marks a sea change in the way the Irish Government intends to approach the issue. It is a signal that this Government is taking human rights seriously”.

Over a year later there is still no sign of this review and the committee has only met twice. It is essential that the Government puts in place a procedure for inspecting flights through Irish airports. It is simply not good enough to rely on a foreign government to tell us what’s happening in our airports.

This week marks eight years since Guantánamo was opened. It must be closed and the remaining 200 or so prisoners released or given a fair trial. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. At least three dozen people believed to have been held in secret US detention centres are still missing. Neither their friends, nor their families know, where they are or what has happened to them.

The US has admitted that it has detained boys as young as thirteen in Guantánamo. Fathers and sons, bothers and loved ones, kidnapped, imprisoned and tortured with no access to their families, and denied a fair trial.

Another 500 prisoners remain in limbo at the US air base in Bagram, Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is appealing against the decision of a US judge to allow these men to challenge their ongoing detention.

No one has been brought to justice for acts of torture or enforced disappearances – both crimes under international law – committed by CIA agents.

Amnesty International Ireland has always been clear. Diplomatic assurances from President Bush were not good enough. They would not be good enough from President Obama. The responsibility to ensure Ireland is not used for illegal acts rests entirely with our Government.

We need to see the promised review of legislation governing searches of suspected rendition flights. The Taoiseach must announce when it will take place, ensure it is comprehensive, commit to making the findings public and to changing the law if necessary.

It is time to ensure we are never again accessories to kidnapping, imprisonment and torture.

You may have read the article I wrote for the Irish Times this week where I made the point that responsibility for covering up child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin was not limited to Bishop Donal Murray but had to be shared by all those in positions of leadership in the Archdiocese.

In particular I pointed out issues arising from the involvement of Bishop Eamon Walsh of a case in the Archdiocese of Dublin and questions about the level of cooperation he gave the Ferns Inquiry when serving as Apostolic Administrator in the Diocese of Ferns. Link here to that article.

Bishop Walsh was none too happy with the facts I laid in my article and responded with barely concealed fury. His response didn’t really deal with the issues raised, instead he accused me of trying to “speak  out if the other side of my mouth”. He went on to call into question my role as Executive Director of Amnesty. The article can be read here.

In the course of his diatribe he did however let slip some rather interesting facts.

For example he said:

But as far back as 1990, I wasn’t a month in the job as a bishop, and I stood up at a meeting and I said that not alone should the police, who were already informed about an individual, but we should say where he was living and the number of his car, because I felt he was a danger.

This is especiall interesting given that Bishop Walsh is both a qualified Barrister (lawyer) and a Canon Lawyer. Often bishops have told us that they did not fully appreciate fully understand child abuse, that they didn’t so much consider it a crime as a moral lapse of some kind. This rather ridiculous excuse has been used in an attempt to suggest that the cover up of these crimes wasn’t deliberate but the result of a mistaken and confused approach to the rape of children by priests. 

But Bishop Walsh has now made it clear that he, a person eminently qualified in the law, appreciated as far back as 1990 that sexual abuse was a crime and that the church should report such crimes to the police.

So the question which Bishop Walsh must now answer is simple enough. Why didn’t be do so?

Bishop Walsh was a member of the first Advisory Panel of the Archdiocese of Dublin established in 1996 to manage child abuse cases. Did Bishop Walsh ensure every case reviewed by the panel was referred to the police?

It appears he did not.

Mary Rafftery addresses this and raises a number of further questions in today’s Irish Times.

BISHOP EAMONN Walsh on Wednesday last made a series of revealing statements to this newspaper on issues of clerical child sexual abuse in both Dublin and Ferns. It is worth analysing these in detail.

Defending himself against those who have called for his resignation, he stated the following: “As far back as 1990, I wasn’t a month in the job as a bishop, and I stood up at a meeting and I said that not alone should the police, who were already informed about an individual, but we should say where he was living and the number of his car, because I felt he was a danger.”

The strong implication here is that the archdiocese reported a specific priest to the Garda as early as 1990. This is a dramatic revelation, particularly as there is no reference to anything like it in the Murphy commission report.

Further, the behaviour of the Dublin bishops at this time was entirely aimed at covering up awareness and allegations of child abuse against their priests. The first time the Dublin archdiocese volunteered information on paedophile priests to the Garda was in fact a full five years later, when in 1995 archbishop Desmond Connell passed on the names of 17 priests (but omitted a further 11 against whom complaints had been made to the archdiocese).

A number of key questions now arise for Bishop Eamonn Walsh, particularly in the light of our knowledge of how the archdiocese applied the principle of mental reservation. Firstly, who precisely informed the Garda in 1990 about this priest, and what exactly was reported? If, as is likely, it was not the archdiocese, but rather a victim, or the parents of an abused child, what co-operation, if any, was offered by the bishops to the Garda?

Given the fact that Bishop Walsh was able to decide in 1990 that the priest was “a danger”, it can be assumed that the bishops had detailed knowledge of this priest’s criminal abuse of children. How much, if any, of this was passed on to the Garda, and when was it passed on?

Secondly, who else was present at the 1990 meeting to which Bishop Walsh refers? If it was one of the regular monthly meetings of all the Dublin bishops, what precisely was the nature of the discussion around reporting these matters to the Garda? What decisions were taken on foot of this? And, crucially, did Bishop Walsh actually follow up on his own suggestion and pass on what he knew about this abusing priest to the police?

Thirdly, Bishop Walsh refers to “a certain person” who “wrote in horror to the archbishop that somebody could even think that way” – a reference to Bishop Walsh’s own suggested reporting to the Garda.

Why does Bishop Walsh not now name this individual? In addition, if the bishop had concerns that information was being withheld from gardaí as early as 1990, what steps did he himself take personally to fulfil his own duty as a citizen to report all criminal activity of which he was aware to the civil authorities?

In relation to the Ferns diocese, the bishop claims an unblemished record. From 2002 to 2006, he was apostolic administrator in Ferns, and thus in charge of handing over the files to the non-statutory inquiry into child abuse established by the government and chaired by retired judge Frank Murphy.

As Bishop Walsh himself states, the Ferns report praises him for his co-operation. Also true is his claim that the report exonerated him in the matter of the last-minute handing over of internal diocesan files containing concerns and allegations against eight new priests. His tardiness was the “result of genuine errors of judgment”. Nonetheless, it meant that these allegations could not be fully investigated, and they appeared only as an appendix to the body of the report.

However, there is another, separate incidence of documentation withheld from the Ferns inquiry until the last moment. The Ferns report took a much sterner attitude to this case, a fact which Bishop Walsh does not mention in his recent remarks. The issue here was particularly serious as it concerned a priest (Fr Iota) still in ministry, a potential continuing danger to children.

The relevant file, which showed that the diocese had known Fr Iota was a child abuser as far back as 1970, was handed over to the inquiry by Bishop Walsh only after the victim (known as “Pamela” in the report) had come forward in the summer of 2005 and had contacted One In Four and Colm O’Gorman. This is despite the fact that the bishop himself had undertaken a complete review of all files upon his arrival in the diocese in 2002 with a focus on identifying any present and continuing risks to children.

The Ferns report states that it “was concerned that the details of this case were not communicated to the inquiry until its work had reached an advanced stage”. It added that the file’s contents “should have alerted the diocese to the existence of a potential child protection issue”.

In fact, Bishop Walsh had been in charge of the Ferns diocese for three years before any action was taken to protect children from this priest, who at the time was ministering abroad.

A full explanation for this three-year delay in dealing with a known child abuser remains to be provided by Bishop Eamonn Walsh.

It appears Bishop Walsh still has a number of questions to answer about his role in the managment of child abuse cases in both the Archdiocese of Dublin and the Diocese of Ferns.

 

 

A feature written for the Irish Sunday Mail about the RTE ‘Would You Believe’ film, My Fathers House which was broadcast on Sunday November 1st 2009.

The house really hasn’t changed much, at least not from the outside. It sat at the end of a long driveway; about two hundred metres back from the road, perched above the church which rests in the hollow below. It’s quite an ugly house, pebble-dashed and still painted the same sickly peachy cream colour as it had been years earlier. Two stories high at the front, there’s another floor hidden from view, a basement.  One of the first things Fr Sean Fortune did upon his appointment to Poulfur in 1981 was to establish youth groups in that basement and a “reconciliation room” for boys who were in trouble at home.

I could see the roof of the church, in a deep hollow to the left of the driveway. The church is built on an old penal mass site, a place of worship going back hundreds of years. The church itself is rather beautiful, nestling at the bottom of the old mass hollow, below the road and surrounded by trees. Driving down the winding roads that lead to Poulfur is a strange experience for me still. It’s almost thirty years since Fr Sean Fortune first brought me there. But driving that road still always takes me back in time. I still get a sense of what it felt like years earlier as he drove me down the same road, away from my home and family and towards this house, his house, and the place where he hurt me so terribly.

I had been back to Poulfur a few times over the years since then. I came back in 1995 when I made my first statement to the Police, detailing how I had been abused for more than two years by Fortune in this same house from 1982 to 1983. I had come back again in 2001, this time with a BBC TV camera crew to make the film Suing the Pope. That was the first time I had come back to the house itself, but I didn’t go inside. Instead we had filmed in the church grounds, with the shadow of the house looming above. Late one night when we had finished filming I went up to the house and peered through the kitchen window. It was dark and the house was empty so I couldn’t see in. I climbed up on the window sill and hung there, peering in to the darkness, desperately trying to see if it was still the same, half-expecting to see the fourteen or fifteen year old me in there slumped over the kitchen table, alone and miserable, trapped there, unable to prevent or even name what was happening to him. That day I had been desperate to get into the house, desperate to find that me, the boy still trapped in that hidden horror. But now, eight years on, things are very different.

For a start I am not trapped any more. I have come back not to free myself from a secret and hidden history, the truth is long out, and I am free of it all. But not everyone is.

The house is no longer the home of the parish priest in Poulfur. After Sean Fortune left and the savage history of his time there was revealed, his successor didn’t want to live there. So the Diocese built a new house for the new priest and Fortune’s house has instead become a space used by community groups for occasional meetings. No-one lives there now. No-one wants to.

A woman from the area said to me recently that she has often wanted to drive down there late one night and burn it down. That she hated it remaining as a kind of dark mausoleum that reminds everyone of the terrible things that happened there.

When RTE’s Would You Believe asked me to work with them on a film following the publication of my book Beyond Belief earlier this year I knew that this was a great opportunity to talk about this history in a new way. I wanted to explain how facing the truth of my own past, and facing it with those whom I loved, had allowed me to finally break free of it. I wanted to try to show how the same might be possible for anyone who remains caught in a past they fear is too painful to face, whatever the cause. How the truth, and a commitment to try and respect each other as we struggle to move beyond secrets and lies and unspeakable hurt, really can set us free.

And so I had to go back, not only to Poulfur but to Adamstown, the County Wexford village I lived in as a child. I had to go back to my father’s house, to the land he had farmed, as had his father before him. I went back there so that I could talk about how facing the truth of the abuse I suffered had allowed me to find my father. Dad and I had been distant for years, each of skirting around the things we couldn’t say to each other and trapped in silence. Facing the past, reporting the abuse to the Police, had forced us to face each other and changed both of our lives. Dad was central in my coming forward back in 1995, his love and his courage made it possible for me to face my own fear. He was and is a huge source of inspiration for me in everything I do.

What we were able to achieve together in facing the truth taught me that allowing hurt to fester only causes greater hurt. It taught me that in facing that which we fear most we often discover the best of who we are. That’s what happened for my Dad and me. That’s our truth.

Fear corrupts. It freezes us. It leaves us unable to react. I used to be afraid all the time, afraid of facing the past for fear of what I might find out about myself. But not anymore.

So often, we run from things we have done that we feel mark us as bad. I know that feeling; for so many years I ran from my own feelings of shame and self-blame.

 

I ran from my life on the streets, the nights where I allowed myself to be exploited in exchange for a bed. I ran from the abuse, my memories of it, my physical reactions to it and my powerlessness to prevent it. I believed that these shameful, awful experiences named the truth of who I was. But they don’t.

 

The truth of who I am is to be found in the way I responded to the events that I have experienced. How I chose to deal with them, once I was free to do so.

 

The things we do as we struggle to survive unspeakable trauma name the power of our instinctive desire to survive, but they say very little about who we are – what we believe and feel, and the principles and values we hold dear. It is only when we have the space to make free and informed choices that we discover who we actually are.

 

And we can only make those kinds of choices when we face our fear and name the truth. We cannot make them if we allow a house to become a tomb to our fear, a place where we hide our demons and refuse to face them. And that’s what Fortune’s house had become to so many people. That’s why it was time to go back and open up those doors, to refuse to allow that place to remain a house of horror and show instead that it was just a house; that no bogey man lives there now and that it cannot hurt us anymore.

I was met at the door by Fr Oliver Sweeney, the parish priest who came to Poulfur back in 2002, just weeks before Suing the Pope was broadcast and who has been there ever since. He is a good and decent man; with a powerful commitment to the people he serves. He had at first feared allowing me to return with cameras in tow, but in the end he saw that letting the world in might allow this place to break free of the past too.  That took courage, and faith, both of which he has in abundance.

He left me alone to walk around the house. I soon forgot the camera was there as I went from room to room. What had been the dining room back then, where Fortune had insisted I sit and have breakfast with him every morning I was there, is now an office. The dark wood dining table and shelves lined with silver teapots are gone to be replaced by filing cabinets and a desk. The room next door is now a meeting room, where regular AA meetings take place; a room where people face their own demons and find strength from a community of others who walk the same road. I liked that a lot. It seemed to me to defy the idea that this house could only ever be a dark place; instead it could become a place of hope and courage.

I went upstairs then. What had been Sean Fortune’s bedroom is on the left at the top of the stairs; it has a big old wooden door painted a gloss white with an old-fashioned ceramic doorknob. There were two other doors at the top of the stairs off the same small landing, leading to other bedrooms, rooms I was never allowed to sleep in when I was brought there. Opposite his bedroom door there had been a prayer space. A kind of small room which had contained a statue of the Virgin Mary which sat upon an altar surrounded by candles in front of which was a prayer kneeler over which there had always been draped a set of glass rosary beads. But that was all gone now. The space was empty, nothing more than a dusty old cupboard.

As I turned to go into Fortune’s old room I remembered how it has looked years earlier. There had been a huge old wardrobe along the right hand wall as one came into the room. Just beyond it used to be a sink in the corner and on the opposite wall was a dressing table with a mirror over it, to the left was the bed, again big and made of old polished wood.

As I walked in, I half-expected it to be the same still. But it wasn’t of course. All the furniture was gone, only the sink in the corner was left. There was nothing there. It was just a room.

As I stood and looked out the window I remembered all that had passed. There were no more secrets. No need to hide from the past anymore. Now it was time to talk about how we might move forward together.

I walked out of the room and headed downstairs to have a cup of tea with Fr Ollie and some members of the parish council and talk about the future. After all, if we allow ourselves to triumph over the past, what else is there?

 

Colm O’Gorman is the author of the memoir Beyond Belief.  

Due to popular demand (alright then, three requests anyway) here is a fab basic muffin recipe. Really quite simple and gorgeous muffins.

1 3/4 cups of plain flour

1/2 cup of sugar

2 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

Some fresh grated nutmeg

Mix these dry ingredients together in a large bowl.

Combine:

1 beaten egg

1/3 cup of melted and cooled butter

1 teaspoon vanilla essence

Half a cup of milk

(add the rind of a lemon or an ornage, plus the fruit if you want to add a citrus flavour to yourt mix.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients roughly…it should be a little lumpy and not too smooth.

For fillings try the following:

A cup of fresh raspberries, and a chopped up small white toblerone make fantastic white chocolate and strawberry muffins.

or

A cup of fresh blueberries (or you can use frozen if neccessary), use the lemon rind and juice with the blueberries as above, they are a great combination.

or

Two roughly chopped bananas, a handful of broken up walmust and a handfull of chopped dates.

or

Make a compote of fresh plums by adding a few spoons of caster sugar to about 700g (1 1/2 lb) of plums stoned and cut int quarters, sprinkle a little fresh cinamon on top and either bake in the oven for about 15 mins or even easier cook down over a low heat on the hob. Add a tablespoon of orange juice ig doing it on the hob

Add the compote and about 125g (4 oz) of chopped up marzipan to the muffin mix. A little more work than ogther mixes, but really worth the trouble.

When you have added your filling to the batter mix spoon it into muffin trays and bake at about 195 to 200C for about 15 mins.

Enjoy!

This week I had the unique experience of being “uninvited” from taking part in a Mass of Healing and Reconciliation planned by Fr Iggy O’Donovan at the Augustinian Church in Drogheda. It seems the Archdiocese of Armagh, led by Cardinal Sean Brady, believes there was something “inappropriate” about the invitation and instructed Fr O’Donovan to withdraw it.

It’s a real shame. A shame that senior Church leaders have chosen to close their hearts, their minds and their ears to words offered in a true spirit of hope. Hope informed by an absolute belief in the endless possibilities to be found in our human capacity to transcend terrible trauma and find a way forward together.

But there it is. They have refused. They have used their power to prevent such a process from finding even more powerful expression by locating it in Church.

As things have worked out though it would appear that the Archdiocese has shot itself in the foot once again. What would have been a quiet, if significant moment, for a few hundred people max in Drogheda has turned into somehting much bigger. Four days of media reports of their instruction to “uninvite” me has simply left them looking foolish and meant that many more people are interested in what I might have said. I have had a few requests from media to give them the text of what I planned to say.

So what are the words I would have spoken that they deem, without any inquiry, to be inappropriate?

As it happens, I didn’t have a text prepared. I prefer to speak without a pre-prepared text as it allows me to engage more with the group I am speaking to in the moment, rather than deliver something I decided would suit before even meeting them.

I of course had a clear sense of what I wanted to say, but wanted to do that in a spontaneous, rather than in a prepared way.

So I sat down and wrote it out. The Irish Times ran bits of it, and earlier today I recorded it for the This Week show for RTE Radio 1. It will go out tomorrow between 1 and 2pm, ironically enough at the same time as the service in the Augustinian Church in Drogheda.

Anyway, here it is, the words Cardinal Brady and Bishop Clifford feared and believed would be somehow “inappropriate”:

I am not here today to rake over old, established hurts. Instead I want to speak about my sense of an immense opportunity for us all, that having named and to a large part owned the truth of the terrible crimes inflicted upon children within church, we might now find a way forward together in a new spirit of truth, compassion, understanding and love. That this might happen within Church here today has I think particular power. If we can come together in the very place where such hurt has in the past been hidden and denied then we really can model something new, something renewed within ourselves; the courage to listen to difficult truths, to learn and to move forward together. We will have conquered fear and refused to be held back by those who remain trapped in their own fear and denial.

We know the harm done. We know the price of our failures to address terrible wrongs and we know we must change the way we work as a society to confront such abuses in the future, to become the kind of society we aspire to be. Perhaps we still fear change? But what would it be like if we were to change? What would that demand of us, and what would it mean for us?

We are so frightened of seeing the darkness in our collective humanity that we fail to embrace the light that exists in at least equal measure there; the profound beauty in our own humanity that can respond with truth and courage to the things we see and do that are simply wrong.

We are so frightened of acknowledging the awful things done to others by people close to us, people we love and even by ourselves that we end up though our denial allowing such things to happen. In our silence we collude, in our denial we facilitate.

What we have yet to understand is that we can only be enriched if we have the courage and compassion, the humanity and integrity to name injustice wherever we see it, especially when we are party to causing injustice ourselves.

I believe in the power of truth. Naming the truth in difficult circumstances is always the right thing to do. If we have the courage to hear and accept the truth of who we are and what we have done, to face it and own it, and to find a way forward from that place, then we can change the world. 

Truth used like that challenges us to face the worst of who we can be, but also to discover the best of who we are. So often, we run from things we have done that we feel mark us as bad. I know that feeling; for so many years I ran from my own feelings of shame and self-blame.

I ran from the abuse, my memories of it, my physical reactions to it and my powerlessness to prevent it. I believed that these shameful, awful experiences named the truth of who I was. But they don’t.

The truth of who I am is to be found in the way I responded to the events that I have experienced. How I chose to deal with them, once I was free to do so.

And the same is true for us all. We can run from the past, deny our responsibility for it, we can blame, judge and hate others, if we choose to. Or we can turn and face it, learn from it and move forward together. We now know what happened within our church and our society. What matters now is how we respond to it, that we find the capacity to learn and change, the compassion to understand the hurts we each experienced and the love to move forward together.

Facing this dark part of our history has been painful in so many ways. But in facing it together we now have the opportunity to discover who we are as a society. We have the chance to show that we have the courage, the integrity and the humanity to work through and past our shared hurt, our failures, our anger and our disappointment, and to become the best of who we can be. In facing our collective darkness we will discover our collective humanity. Surely we owe each other that?

From the first letter of St. John:

Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

 

The article below is my response to an opinion piece in the Evening Herald a week or so ago, link to that here, and comments by Cardinal Sean Brady at the weekend, link to that story here.

I thought it might be worth posting here as well.

Irish people want equality for everyone — gay or straight. It’s time Cardinal Seán Brady caught up

Originally appeared in The Evening Herald on Tuesday August 25 2009

Three months on and I am only now finding time to listen to some of the media I did to launch Beyond Belief.

I loved Midweek on BBC Radio 4 with Libby Purvess. Libby was great, she was so engaged and got the very best out of a pretty diverse panel.

Actress Penelope Wilton was about to tread the boards as Gertrude in Hamlet in the West End, with Jude Law as Hamlet. She was lovely, and my twelve year old son was mightly impressed that I met the actress who played a Prime Minister in Dr Who!

Anyone who was described as “a very dangerous man” by Margaret Thatcher must be doing something right. Thatcher wasn’t a fan of Donald Reeves, the former Rector of St James, Piccadill. Donald is a true radical, driven by principle and common sense.

Soren and Bradley Stauffer Kruse are The Sugar Dandies. The couple are World Same Sex Ballroom Dancing Champions. Their take on life and all things ballroom was intriguing. When he isn’t twirling Bradley in a pink poodle costume around the dance floor Soren works as  a counselling psychologist.

Intrigued? You can listen here.

Brodcast on May 20 2009, on this episode on BBC Radio 4’s Midweek Libby Purves is joined by Colm O’Gorman, Penelope Wilton, Donald Reeves and Bradley and Soren Stauffer Kruse.

Click here to listen.

Colm O’Gorman is Ireland’s executive director of Amnesty International and founder of the charity One in Four, which helps victims of abuse. When he was 14 he suffered sexual abuse over several years by a local parish priest, who went on to be accused of 66 charges of sexual offences against teenage boys. In 1998 he sued the Roman Catholic Church and the Pope. Beyond Belief is published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Penelope Wilton is one of Britain’s leading actresses. She is about play Gertrude in Michael Grandage’s production of Hamlet. Her work is extensive and includes – for theatre – The Family Reunion, The Chalk Garden (for which she won the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress) and The House of Bernarda Alba, for television Half Broken Things, Dr Who and Ever Decreasing Circles, and for film The History Boys, Pride and Prejudice and Calendar Girls. Hamlet is part of the Donmar in the West End season at Wyndham’s Theatre.

Donald Reeves is probably best known for being Rector of St James’s, Piccadilly, where he created a radical church with a coffee house and street market. In his book, Memoirs of a Very Dangerous Man, he tells of life in the church as well as his several brushes with Lady Thatcher and his devotion to working for peace in the Balkans. Memoirs of a Very Dangerous Man is published by Continuum.

The Sugar Dandies are made up of Soren and Bradley Stauffer Kruse. They are the same sex ballroom dance champions and the first male couple to be regular ballroom dance competitors.

An opinion piece for the Irish Daily Mail, May 26 2009

Over the past weekend senior church figures including cardinal Sean Brady and Archbishop Diarmuid Martin have called upon the religious congregations to look again at the now notorious indemnity deal they negotiated with the state back in 2002. That deal, done in the last days of an outgoing Government, fully indemnified the religious orders against all future financial liability resulting from cases taken by victims of institutional abuse. The deal saw the church contribute €127 million to the now total estimated cost of €1.3billion – less than ten percent.

The Ryan report is frank in its view of the relationship between the Catholic church and the state when it came to responding to child abuse in state-funded, Catholic Church institutions. Mr Justice Ryan describes the attitude of the department of education to the church as ‘deferential and submissive’. The department, which ought to have had a supervisory and inspection role, ‘generally saw itself as facilitating the congregations’.

If the attitude of Dr Michael Woods and former Taoiseach Bertie Ahern is any indication of how that relationship stood in 2002 when the infamous deal was struck, it appears that this may well remain the case.

In 2002, when the BBC film suing the pope was broadcast, the film where I spoke about how I had been abused by Fr. Sean Fortune, Bertie Ahern was asked if he had any comment to make on the public uproar about the cover up of child abuse in the diocese of ferns. He didn’t have a thing to offer.

‘I haven’t really been following that at all,’ he proclaimed. ‘It’s really a matter for the church; it’s not a matter for politicians. I’m not going to cross politics and religion.’

I remember being dumbstruck at the ignorance of that view. The head of our government believed that the abuse of children by priests in Ireland was not a matter for the state. That child protection and responses to such serious crimes was not the business of the state. No wonder, it seemed to me, that such abuse had been able to continue with impunity and that errant clerics were left free to rape and abuse in dioceses across Ireland. No wonder that children were so abandoned by a state whose attitude of deference rendered it submissive to an organisation it had an obligation to hold to account for the savage harm it inflicted upon children in institutional ‘care’.

Over this past weekend we saw further defence of an indefensible deal and more evidence of a blinkered, ill informed ignorance of the reality of a dark past.

The state, it would appear, was reluctant to bankrupt the church by forcing them to be properly accountable for their failures and crimes. Why?

Why should the church, like any other entity, not be held to account? If the consequence of their actions is that they become bankrupt then surely, so be it. Perhaps in order to rebuild elements of a church that has so abandoned their founding Christian values they must first be torn down. Irish society built up the Catholic Church in Ireland through financial donations, volunteering and vocations. If Ireland values a renewed, healthy reformed Catholic Church it will do so again. What gave Messers Ahern and Woods the right to make that decision for us? What gave them the right to decide that we would happily underwrite the Catholic Church and protect it from the consequences of its own actions? Isn’t that up to us to decide for ourselves? Isn’t it time that the church and the state in this country were finally truly separate entities?

The Ryan Report has achieved a lot. It has entirely vindicated the words of victims who suffered barbarism at the hands of those whose duty, and professed vocation, should have demanded tender and Christian care. What it has not delivered at all though is justice.

Justice demands accountability. It demands that the perpetrator of a wrong be held accountable for their actions and that they make reparation for the harm caused to their victims. This has not happened.

No one has been named in the report, for understandable legal reasons, though some names are beginning to emerge into the public arena through the media. Few have been prosecuted through the courts, and the evidence collected by the commission cannot now be used to prosecute those found to have committed heinous crimes against children. There has been no legal accountability, no naming of those responsible and no accountability, apart from before the court of public opinion, of the institution so responsible for these shocking atrocities.

The state, through its flawed systems and deferential attitudes, has failed victims of abuse in institutions once again.

And so we find ourselves in a position where ministers suggest that it would be helpful if the congregations were prepared to reopen and renegotiate the deal they struck with Dr Woods. Yet again the church will not be held to account but requested an agreement to offer a ‘gesture’ as Archbishop Martin put it yesterday.

Well, gestures are not good enough. Accountability is not something that ought be in the gift of the perpetrator, rather it should be ensured through the actions of a society focused on justice.

The state must put in place a new process. For a start it must carry out a full audit of the assets of all religious congregations and bodies implicated in the Ryan Report. It should determine the value of all available assets and whether there has been any transfer of assets in recent years to put them beyond the reach of the state. We need a NAMA for the church, a body to assess and then seize assets which can be used to ensure at least financial accountability by those responsible for the crimes detailed in the Ryan Report.

One other thought. Cardinal Sean Brady has called for a ‘one church response’ to the findings of the Ryan Report. Let’s hold him to that. After all, bishops are the superiors in their dioceses. They and they alone determine whether a religious order can operate within the boundaries of their individual kingdoms.

And bishops are not without responsibility for abuse in institutions. In the case of those operated by the sisters of mercy they have some direct responsibility. Until 1994 there was no national governance structure for that particular order. Instead there were twenty-six separate provinces with leadership teams who reported to their diocesan bishop. The bishop was their superior. It seems to me that it is now time to ask the bishops what responsibility they accept for abuse perpetrated in institutions under their control.

I have often been heartened by the courage and frankness of Diarmuid Martin. He has shown a capacity for bold and radical leadership. We need more of that now.

He and Cardinal Brady are in a position to do more than suggest a new approach by the religious orders. They can insist upon change as a condition of allowing those same orders to operate within their dioceses – as can their brother bishops.

And what of Rome? Where does the Vatican sit in respect of this ‘one church response’? Given the wealth held by Rome surely it’s not too much to ask that this one church to which we have sworn our allegiance every Sunday for so many years might now agree to sell off some of its art, surrender its penchant for ermine-trimmed robes and grandiose exhibitions of wealth in order to ensure redress for the crimes of those who operated in its name.

Perhaps, through such a return to the true Christian values of its founder, we might even witness a renewed and resurgent church, renewed by newfound honesty and humility – and finally able to look to the future.

Colm O’Gorman is the author of Beyond Belief, published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Well this was an interesting debate. Dr Bill Donohue of the Catholic League issued a statement in which he condemned “hysteria” over clerical sexual abuse in Ireland.

Matt Cooper at Today Fm’s Last Word asked me to come on the show and debate the issue with the good Dr Donohue. It was quite the discussion.

I never ceased to be amazed at just how blind some ‘commentators’ can be when faced with a truth which challenegs their view of the world. Dr Donohues simplistic analysis of the Ryan Report is shocking to say the least. I am always of the view that it is better to give space and time in such debates for the opposing view to undermine itself. In this case it didn’t take much time or effort on my part for that to happen.

Let me know what you think.

From The Sunday Times

Don’t look away: it’s unbelievable that we still haven’t learnt the lessons from systematic child abuse in Ireland
by Libby Purves

Understandably distracted by our own little crisis of trust, we have perhaps not taken in the apocalyptic import of a bigger one across the Irish Sea.

Perhaps it is a vague sense that we knew it all; perhaps reluctance to engage with the horrid details of the Ryan report into child abuse by Irish clerics. Perhaps some think it is old history, a 1950s horror. Maybe there is even a decorous sense that — as a new Archbishop of Westminster is enthroned here — it is tasteless to dwell on the wickedness deliberately concealed by his Church right into the 1990s. Or maybe our own child protection system now looks so shaky that we cannot bear to contemplate the toothless, deferential Irish respect for the priesthood that enabled thousands of children to be starved, raped, enslaved and beaten even as Ireland moved into its tiger economy in the new Europe.

But don’t look away. There are wider lessons. Ireland is at least looking squarely at it now, and trying to understand how history twisted its public values into obeisance to unanswerable clergy, so that cruelty and child rape became endemic. It was not only in orphanages and schools but in parishes where families dared not protest. For it was the courageous Colm O’Gorman who helped to prise this all open, when he spoke of his repeated rape, at 14, by Father Sean Fortune in his home village. He successfully sued the Church and challenged the Pope (whose nuncio hid behind “diplomatic immunity”).

The victim was accused by the Vatican of being part of a conspiracy; “Canon Law” defences were invoked and the first report — the Ferns report — ignored. “How can it be,” asks Mr O’Gorman, “that a church hierarchy who comment on a children’s film [Harry Potter] can fail to comment on a report, commissioned by this State, that found Rome culpable in the rape and abuse of Irish children?”

Now the wider, more terrifying Ryan report has met with almost equal evasion and the Church — which raked in millions from government subsidy over decades — has even managed to slough off most of its financial responsibility.

I am not exaggerating; rather the contrary. The Ryan report, merciless and forensic, finds the crimes “systemic, pervasive, chronic, excessive, arbitrary”. It speaks of the deliberate protection of priests and religious by their hierarchy; of inspectors and police backing off respectfully and senior clergy refusing to help the inquiry. It says that the order that housed the worst sadists, the Christian Brothers, made only a “guarded, conditional and unclear” apology, and cut a deal that no individuals should be named.

The children’s own testimonies are too harrowing to repeat: beaten, stripped, humiliated, hung from windows. Some got pregnant, some killed themselves. Sexual attack came not only from their keepers but visiting functionaries; one little boy who spoke of being assaulted by an ambulance driver was beaten by the nuns “to get the evil out of him”.

Enough. There is no defence, the evidence is overwhelming. It was a sickness of cruelty, exploitation, official cowardice and inward-looking hypocrisy traceable all the way to the Vatican. Catholicism has not been cleaned up, only lightly dusted. Some Irish dioceses have become properly robust, and Cardinal Seán Brady, the Primate of All Ireland, speaks of being “deeply ashamed”; but I do not notice him pointing his condemnation upwards or rejecting the culture of hierarchy and obedience, anonymity and deniability.

Our own new Archbishop, Vincent Nichols, expressed due horror, but then enraged survivors by praising the “courage” of clergy “who have to face these facts from their past”. Incredibly, in an interview on Five Live, he also observed: “it is a tough road to take, to face up to our own weaknesses. That is certainly true of anyone who’s deceived themselves that all they’ve been doing is taking a bit of comfort from children.”

Weakness? Comfort? God save us! It gives an insight into why the Church, quick to absolve, blithely moved known abusers on to fresh fields and fresh victims.

“They had their own laws that were written to ensure they were never in the wrong” says Mr O’Gorman, simply. And they covered their backs: when the former Archbishop of Dublin was told that he could be liable if abusers were returned to parishes, he did not prevent this happening. He just took out an insurance policy against financial losses from such claims.

It has been an Irish disaster, but has lessons for us all about the perils of respectful naivety. Archbishop Nichols, after his predecessor moved a paedophile priest to Gatwick, where he offended again, said that little was known about paedophilia then; well, he still knows little if he can talk about men “taking a bit of comfort from children”.

This is pure celibate silliness: we are not talking about cuddles here, but rape. I grew up with the Catholic doctrine of forgiveness of sins, I know the territory: but to forgive your own team and ignore their victims is not holy. It is corrupt.

When good people are smug and bad ones are slippery, great evils grow. When any institution slaps on a self-approving label — whether it is “Holy Catholic Apostolic” or like our MP’s, “Honourable” — and uses it to defy cynical inspection, the weak will suffer. What seems not to be fully understood by the hierarchy is how much damage this has done.

It gives me no pleasure to say so: I was raised a Catholic, and know what high ideals of gentleness it expresses, and how beautifully.

I learnt at 12 years old not to believe in the automatic holiness of the religious, in a South African convent where nuns hit us and spoke contemptuously of “kaffirs”. I then learnt not to condemn the lot, when I moved back to a kindly, intellectual English convent where they honestly tried to live the holy dream. I have always been able to believe the tales of evil without rejecting the whole shebang.

Many Catholic clergy do great good. The remarkable Colm O’Gorman, after decades of struggle, does not reject the ideal either: he says he wept for Father Fortune’s suicide and hopes that in afterlife he finds forgiveness.

Now that’s holiness for you, and without a smug label round its neck. And until the institutional Catholic Church recognises that, abases itself, pays up, allows whistleblowing and faces the unthinkable, it remains a disgrace. Until it learns humility, it has no hope at all. It is a Church living with one foot in Hell.

 

I’ll do my first ever live in studio interview for Beyond Belief  this morning with the fabulous Jumoke Fashola on BBC London. Really looking forward to it. I’m in London for the next five says and have lots of media lined up. After months of waiting its all go. I am relieved that the waiting is finally over and I can get on with it at last.

Link here to Jumoke’s site whre you can hear the interview.

In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice. 

Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives. 

Article 27: Everyone has the right to take part in the cultural life of their community and the right to benefit from scientific and artistic learning
History has shown how economic hardship can bring out the worst in human beings. As Ireland deals with the new economic climate, Colm O’Gorman urges for a greater collective effort to work for a truly global recovery

Colm O'Gorman

 

In 1948, in a global effort to ensure that the inhumanity of the Second World War would never happen again, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)was passed and adopted by the United Nations without a single dissenting voice. 

Colm O’Gorman, Executive Director of Amnesty International Irish Section, in association with RTE Radio 1’s Drivetime programme, broadcast a series of radio columns, one dedicated to each article of the Declaration, to bring this historical and foundational document to life, demonstrating how central and relevant it is to our everyday lives. 

Article 26: Everyone has the right to education and to free primary education
Our Constitution says that the state has a responsibility to provide for education. That is to provide for, but not to provide. After attending a local school fundraiser, Colm O’Gorman asks why we don’t demand that the state lives up to a higher responsibility and ensures that every child is entitled to, and receives, the highest possible standard of education.

Colm O'Gorman