Its Christmas Eve and I have just done two radio interviews for the BBC following the resignation of the Bishop of Kildare. Bishop Moriarty resigned four weeks after the publication of the report of the Commission of Investigation into child abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.
He was the second bishop to resign, Donal Murray quit last week and three further bishops, Eamonn Walsh, Raymond Field and Martin Drennan are under increasing pressure to resign their positions.
The report was damning in its view of how the Catholic Church managed child abuse by its priests. It didn’t simply find that individual bishops had mismanaged cases; it found that there had been a deliberate cover up in an effort to protect the institution, its money and its interests.
The Commission has no doubt that clerical child sexual abuse was covered up by the Archdiocese of Dublin and other Church authorities over much of the period covered by the Commission’s remit. The structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up. The State authorities facilitated the cover up by not fulfilling their responsibilities to ensure that the law was applied equally to all and allowing the Church institutions to be beyond the reach of the normal law enforcement processes. The welfare of children, which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered in the early stages. Instead the focus was on the avoidance of scandal and the preservation of the good name, status and assets of the institution and of what the institution regarded as its most important members – the priests.
Noteworthy is the mention of “other Church authorities” and the finding that “the structures and rules of the Catholic Church facilitated that cover-up”. The Commission clearly believes that the cover up extends beyond the Archdiocese of Dublin and is the result of established Roman Catholic Church rules and structures. And who is responsible for Church rules and structures? The Vatican is of course and the supreme pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Benedict XVI.
So what has the response of the Vatican been to the Murphy Report? Well, the Pope has expressed his disgust and outrage at the content of the report. Mind you given the fact that he was responsible for the management of clerical child sexual abuse within the global church for the best part of two decades it can’t have been the detail of the abuse that “outraged” him, he must have been very familiar with that already. Perhaps it was the criticism of the institution that alarmed him? No doubt we will hear more in his upcoming pastoral letter to the Irish Church due sometime next year.
Whist we wait for that stunning moment though we do have other indicators of the Pope’s view of the scandal. Yesterday he gave his annual address to the Roman Curia (the global church government departments) yesterday. This event is akin to a ‘State of the Union’ address, an annual speech which addresses the important events in the life of the church over the preceding year.
Given the findings of both the Ryan and Murphy Reports, both published this year, one might have reasonably expected the Pope to address the issue of child abuse by priests and the now established fact that his church has grossly mismanaged such abuse. But he did not.
Not important enough clearly.
A Vatican spokesperson explained that no special significance can be attached to the Pope’s failure to mention the abuse scandals. The Irish Times covers the story – Link here.
Fr Lombardi said it would be wrong to attribute any significance to this, saying the pope would shortly be dealing with Ireland in the relatively unprecedented context of a “pastoral letter” to the “faithful in Ireland”.
“This speech is . . . not intended as a speech that will cover all the events of the year . . . As for Ireland, the pope will have plenty to say about the Irish church in his forthcoming pastoral letter to the Irish faithful. You will have plenty to reflect on in that document.”
Fr Lombardi also said the speech to the curia was addressed to the “universal church”.
“It’s obvious that the Irish church’s problems are very serious, there is a very dramatic situation there. However, this is really the specific problem of one country.”
So there we have it. It’s our problem you see. A local issue and not something worthy of mention in the context of the “universal” church.
So the scandals haven’t been an issue anywhere else at all really. Not in the US, Canada, Australia, the UK, not in France despite the conviction of a Bishop there for failing to report abuse, not in Brazil where up to ten percept of Roman Catholic priests have been accused of sexual misconduct.
No, not in any of those places…just here.
Fair enough so.
So all we need is the wise counsel of Benedict XVI in the form of his pastoral letter and we will surely learn how to redeem ourselves and find our way back to goodness.
In the past seven years we have now seen the resignations of four bishops in Ireland who have been implicated in the mismanagement of child sexual abuse by priests of the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop Brendan Comiskey resigned in April 2002 after his resignation was sought by the Vatican under a code of canon law which requires a bishop who is deemed unfit for office to resign. Cardinal Desmond Connell resigned as Archbishop of Dublin in 2004 after many months of pressure and public outrage about his management of child abuse in the Dublin diocese. His resignation was scheduled, we were told as he had reached retirement age, but it was clear that he could not have continued in office following revelations of appalling mismanagement of child abuse. Bishop John Magee quit as administrator of the Diocese of Cloyne this year after child protection practice in the diocese was described as “dangerous” by the church’s own child protection body.
And finally, after much public disquiet, and widespread public condemnation of his role in the sex abuse scandal in the Archdiocese of Dublin it is reported that the Vatican will announce the resignation of Bishop Donal Murray at 11am tomorrow .
It must be said that not one of them went easily or with much grace. All resisted public pressure and public outrage and appeared to be unwilling or unable to understand the need for them to take responsibility for the dreadful and wilful mismanagement of child abuse in diocese for which they had responsibility. Of course, Bishop Donal Murray is not the only serving bishop who had responsibility for child protection in the Archdiocese of Dublin over the period investigated by Judge Yvonne Murphy and her team. His resignation will likely lead to increased pressure on the remaining four named in the Murphy Report; Bishops Walsh, Field, Moriarty and Drennan.
But we must ask ourselves just how much has been achieved by any of these resignations? Certainly many people may feel better knowing that these men are no longer in positions of enormous responsibility and power, but will their resignations result in any meaningful change to the culture of cover up and self-preservation which has placed so many children at the mercy of serial abusers right across the global Roman Catholic Church? I don’t believe so.
The fact remains that the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI continue to evade accountability for the cover ups at a global level and have failed to even respond to calls for them to put in place mandatory child protection across the global church. The Vatican ignored requests for information from the Murphy about their knowledge of and policy on child abuse by priests.
The church asserts that things have changed, that it is tackling child abuse and has put in place new mechanisms and policies to protect children. The fact remains thought that these policies have only been created in countries where scandal and public outrage which resulted from the advocacy of victims and media scrutiny forced a response upon a reluctant and dishonest church.
In countries where there have been no scandals and where victims remain marginalised and silent there have been no new polices and no action to protect children. Of course it is also clear that adherence to these shiny new policies are at best patchy. Evidence of this is to be found in the case of the Diocese of Cloyne and similar stories continue to emerge in other countries.
The cover up of child sexual abuse by the Roman Catholic Church is not the result of some befuddled bishops failure to understand the nature of abuse and its impact on children. Church history is littered with references to clerical paedophilia going back as far as the first century AD. Bishops took out insurance to protect their money from any future legal claims by victims of clerical abusers here in Ireland in the mid to late 1980s. Dioceses across the world also took out similar policies. This years before the scandals became public and the self same Bishops protested that they had no understanding of child abuse; they told us they didn’t even understand such crimes were prevalent. They lied and covered up crimes against children and turned a blind eye to the activities of the serial abusers they knowingly unleashed on unsuspecting communities.
The culture of the institutional Roman Catholic Church is rotten. It is corrupt. It’s that simple really. And until the Vatican and Pope Benedict XVI accepts responsibility for its deliberate and wilful mismanagement of child abuse nothing will change and children will remain in terrible danger.
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.
