It appears Sean Brady may have committed a criminal offence in 1975 afterall.
I just got got taught another lesson about the power of social networks and new media when I popped onto my Facebook page a few moments ago. All day we have been hearing apologists for Cardinal Sean Brady assert that he committed no crime when he swore to child victims of sexual assault to secrecy and failed to report those crimes to the Gardai or any other civil authority. People like Monsignor Maurice Dooley who has been popping up to defend the indefensible and proclaim that Sean Brady committed no crime and was quite right in his decision not to report child rape and abuse to the police. I kid you not, he actually spouted this during a debate with me on The last Word on Today FM earlier. If you can stomach it you can listen to that debate here.
Well it appears that he may well have, thats provided the Offences against the State Act 1939 is still in force. That act, and thanks to Francis for the heads up on this, states:
17.—(1) Every person who shall administer or cause to be administered or take part in, be present at, or consent to the administering or taking in any form or manner of any oath, declaration, or engagement purporting or intended to bind the person taking the same to do all or any of the following things, that is to say:—
( a ) to commit or to plan, contrive, promote, assist, or conceal the commission of any crime or any breach of the peace, or
( d ) to abstain from disclosing or giving information of the Commission or intended or proposed commission of any crime, breach of the peace, or from informing or giving evidence against the person who committed such an act,
I have ommitted sections 17 (1) b & c as they are not relevant to this case. Here is a link to the full text of the act.
If this legislation remains on the statute books, and it appears it does, the Cardinal Sean Brady and his co-inquisitors may well have committed a criminal offence. I see the Labour Party have rightly called for the Gardai to investigate his conduct in this case. If they do, as they clearly should, he might yet face charges.
Of course so then should any other cleric or member of the hierarchy who required any child or adult victim of clerical sexual abuse to swear any similar oath.
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Colm,
I just emailed the Garda Commissioner Fachtna Murphy having read that same post on your Facebook page. I would encourage as many people as possible to do the same and demand police action against Cardinal Seán Brady.
The Garda Commissioner can be emailed at: commissioner@garda.ie
Fiachra
Men like Cardinal Sean Brady, who participated in the silencing of child victims, forced these children into further isolation, and aided and abetted their priest perps who got to hightail it out of town. What kind of theology allows a man to close his eyes in the face of such horror and then prance around altars distributing sacraments?
Cardinal Brady should step down while being investigated. Simple human decency requires it.
I hope that the lawmakers in Ireland are braver than the lawmakers of Boston, who were afraid of offending their Catholic constituency by prosecuting Cardinal Law. In Boston, it was just taken for granted that Law would walk free, from the simple fact that clerics, particularly high-hatted ones, were never brought to court to account for their crimes of omission. I was amazed that even after being called before a Grand Jury in Boston for testimony that Cardinal Law wasn’t held accountable for his crimes and coverups with hundreds of Pedophile Priests in the Boston Archdiocese. Had Law not stepped down, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the good people of Boston had “tarred and feathered him and run him out of town on a rail,” in the good, old-fashioned American tradition of (vigilante) justice. Cardinal Law is lucky that he wasn’t a Cardinal in Texas, where his fate for using “Moral Reservation” in his testimony wouldn’t have been acceptable! Law of course escaped to Rome, where he probably won’t be extradited even if some good, old fashioned Protestants lawmakers decide that Law owes a debt to society and the good people of Boston.
I know that I sound like a broken record, but this is only the tip of the iceberg.
And we CANNOT let ourselves off the hook of responsibility here if we are going to end this abuse.
The real problem here is one of massive, two millenium-old perpetration of a christ mythology as history in which these so called holy men offer ’salvation’ from ‘damnation’ if we follow their every rule and whim. In the end, the real scandal here is US….because for two thousand years we have let these witch doctors tell us a mythologically based story that we have bought for fear of losing our ’souls’, whatever that may mean. We do not want to lose our ‘immortal souls’ whatever they may be, and so we do as we are told as a sort of fire insurance against spiritual disaster.
We are the spiritual equivalents of a four year old.
Those who are really to blame for allowing this crazy, mythologically based fairey tale to rule our very lives on an hourly basis are you and me. We are not blameless here. We have allowed ourselves, our children and our grandchildren to buy into this entire social structure based on …..exactly what…an impossible-to-verify story of a god-man who was crucified and died in three hours (an impossibility by the way) and who is coming back on a cloud to take us all to some sort of Middle Eastern version of Valhalla? Are you kidding me? Do you understand how crazy this is? Do you understand OUR part in this nonsense?
And then we all have the unmitigated gall to ask ourselves how could this special class of shamans in medieval dress ever get this kind of power to rape children in plain sight? They got this power to rape and sodomize children because we gave it to them….you and me…and our parents…and their parents…all the way back to Rome in the first century. WE HANDED THEM THIS POWER.
We were taught as Catholics to look the other way when a priest, nun or lay brother acted crazy. Do not lie to yourself about this. YOU HAVE DONE THIS IN YOUR LIFETIME and so have I. You have looked the other way. Neither you or I are blameless here. We were indoctrinated that these sociopathic morons were in a special class of people and that they therefore had to get special privileges…a sort of noble class that could do whatever it wanted just this side of murder…and get away with it.
And they have.
Do not deny it. You and I spent a Catholic lifetime looking the other way. We were taught to do so.
And this is the end result.
Tom Barnes
Alexandria, VA
The CC is evil and corrupt. Justice must be done and seen to be done. Named, Shamed and punished is the only way for these horrible people. Brady is a disgrace. Maurice Dooley is disgusting. There must be more hidden horrors in this organization that need to be dragged out of them.
Interesting. So how does one go about getting this ‘person’ charged with this crime, is it simply a matter of going down to the local Garda station and filing a charge ? Can I as an ordinary person on the street do so and if so, how can I be sure the Gardai do anything about it ? As far as I’m concerned the time for talking has long passed and it’s time to make these people pay for what’s gone on.
Colm, I just listened to your debate with Maurice Dooley on the Last Word and I’d like to congratulate you on how you dealt with him. I cannot believe how heartless he is. and his voice and accent brought me back to my boarding school days. I wish there were people like you around then to stand up to these bullies.
This is a two thousand year world wide problem. I was boarded for three years in the sixties in a leading Roman Catholic school in Colombo, Sri Lanka and most of the prefects and rector in charge of the boarders beat and raped children between 8 and 17 for many years, some committed suicide in later years. The parents worshiped these criminals without reserve, even kneeling in front of them for blessings including my parents.
The only punishment these criminals suffered was that they were not allowed to serve mass for a two week period. Sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in poor countries like Sri Lanka is simply beyond belief.
Advanced countries of the West are only now seeing through the crap of the Catholic doctrines and philosophies, and that too in an awfully slow fashion Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens not withstanding, but in poor countries the Catholic flocks respect these criminals due to sheer ignorance. They ardently believe that god sent his only son Jesus to be murdered because Adam ate an apple. One cannot tell them otherwise and that it is silly to believe such crap. I say, this is not a laughing matter, I believed it too till I was nearly twenty five.
Let’s see, it’s only a matter of time.
The 1939 Act was judged to be constitutional by the Supreme Court – except for the wording of the section re internment of subversive suspects.
It thus can no longer be challenged as possibly unconstitutional.
And it remains in force.