Another case involving Cardinal Sean Brady, a Priest accused of sexual assaults and a confidentiality agreement is breaking in the news.

But I would urge caution in any rush to judgment of the actions of Cardinal Brady in this latest case.

At first glance it appears damning. A woman who has reported an allegation of  serious sexual assault by a named priest sued that priest and Cardinal Sean Brady in his capacity as Archbishop of Armagh. The case was settled in the past few months and one of the conditions of the settlement is that it be kept confidential.

But where this case differs entirely from the Brendan Smyth case and many others is that the assaults had been reported to the police. In fact the priest was charged with sexual offences in relation to another woman and the Director of Public Prosecutions directed that there be no prosecution in this second case. The priest appeared before a court in 2003 and was acquitted of the charges.

The Archdiocese has released a statement on the case this evening.

It sets out the action that Cardinal Brady says he took to manage the case.

The day following the police interview, Cardinal Brady suspended Fr*** from ministry as a priest, forbidding him to say Mass publicly, to hear confessions and to have unsupervised access to minors.

That seems like pretty decisive and appropriate action on the part of the Archdiocese.

In dealing with the suggestion that Cardinal Brady may have required confidentiality from the woman who took the case, the statement says:

..the complainant on behalf of whom no prosecution had been brought sought compensation for her injuries from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board and, separately, from Fr ****  and from Cardinal Brady.

The complainant and Fr **** subsequently settled the case between themselves.

The complainant withdrew her proceedings against Cardinal Brady and her proceedings before the Compensation Board.

Cardinal Brady was not involved in the discussions between the complainant and Fr **** other than to make it clear that he would not be a party to any confidentiality agreement between Fr **** and the complainant, that he intended to commence a canonical process against Fr **** and to invite the complainant to assist as a witness by giving evidence in that canonical process.

Again, that seems appropriate in many ways, though there are a few issues that require clarification.

Firstly, as a named defendant in the case exactly what defense or attitude did Cardinal Brady adopt to the case. And most importantly how did he engage with the woman who was suing him personally in relation to her dropping/settling her case against him? Was she aware that the settlement was solely with the priest and not with the Cardinal? What communication passed between the Cardinal’s solicitors and her solicitors in that regard?

It seems difficult to understand how the Cardinal could have simply accepted that the case was going away without any need for him to clarify his own position at all.

Secondly, why has it taken more than eight years for Cardinal Brady to “commence a canonical process” against the priest?

And why, despite being suspended from ministry was the priest attending church events dressed in clerical garb and presenting himself as a priest in good standing?

The statement issued by the Archdiocese goes on to say:

Father **** remains suspended from ministry as a priest.

Cardinal Brady has forbidden Father **** from wearing clerical attire.

This again seems appropriate. However, given that the priest appears to have been wearing his clerical garb and attending church events, though this awaits final confirmation, questions arise as to the effectiveness of the management of this case by the Archdiocese.

In summary, why has it taken more than eight years to initiate a canonical process and why has the priest been able to present himself publicly as a priest in good standing and wearing his clerical garb?

As Cardinal Brady must surely have learned from the Brendan Smyth case it is clearly not enough to remove a priests ‘licence’ to minister and hear confession. If there are solid grounds for concern about a priest further action is necessary to safeguard children and vulnerable adults.

This case is not at all on a par with the case of obvious cover up and failure in the 1975 investigation into Brendan Smyth, but Cardinal Brady should clarify how he engaged with the settlement and what action he took if any to bring about an end to the suit brought against him.

The source of the money paid in damages to the plaintiff in the case must also be clarified. The Cardinal should make it clear whether or not church funds were used to fund this settlement.

Delays in the commencement of the canonical process must also be explained and the question of how the priest was able to continue to wear clerical garb must also be addressed.

As the Cardinal was personally engaged with the case from the time of the first complaint to the police he is obviously in a position to clarify these issues himself.

Again, I would caution against a rush to judgement in this case given what the Cardinal has said about his role in the case and the action he took.

I listened very carefully to what Cardinal Sean Brady had to say in his homily delivered earlier today in St Patricks Cathedral, Armagh. I downloaded the text and read and re-read it several times. I wanted to ensure that I was being as objective as possible, really listening to both what was said and how it was said. I did all that I could to be open to his words and to respect what he had to say and the possibility that he was speaking truth with integrity and purpose.

One thing is very clear to me; the journey that Sean Brady now has to undertake is a very painful and challenging one. I am acutely aware that I will never have to face the fact that an action or inaction of mine has resulted in the rape and abuse of countless children. Or that I was party to a cover up of such terrible crimes. Or that I consciously chose to swear to secrecy children who had just described how they had been brutalised and sexually assaulted by a colleague of mine, giving my allegiance not to them in their time of anguish but to the institution I represented, to its power and majesty, its position and its wealth.

That is a difficult journey for any person who has believed that their commitment to their institution was based on deeply held faith and principle, and who believed that they had a vocation to the service of a God of love and compassion.

This must be a truly shattering time for Sean Brady, and on a human level I feel concerned for him, in the struggle he faces.

It cannot be a comfortable experience for this man, this Prince of the church to have to express his shame at his past actions.

But this is not about him and his hurt. Right now our first concern must be for those who have been hurt as a result of his actions and inactions and the devastation and betrayal that they feel as they realise the depth and extent of that failure. I have heard Sean Brady express his regret and now his shame, but I have also heard in this past few days women and men brutalised by Fr Brendan Smyth express their anguish at the realisation that had Sean Brady done the right thing and reported Smyth, they might have been spared appalling abuse and trauma.

One sentence that leapt from the page at me was the following.

This week a painful episode from my own past has come before me.

It bothered me because it again suggests that the difficulty for the Cardinal is not that he was not so much what he did in 1975, but that he has been caught.

Cardinal Brady has been aware for some time that this case was an issue. It has been before him for much longer than a week. But it appears that it has only presented Cardinal Brady with a real difficulty once it became public.

I must also say that I would be much more impressed with the Cardinals homily has he restricted himself to an acknowledgement of his own failure and shame and that of his institution. But he did not.

I am struck by how so often the Church places itself beyond the rules which apply to the rest of us. In explaining his failure to report the abuse, Sean Brady and his clerical defenders have told us that he was following orders or the rules of the process as laid down in Canon Law. Canon Lawyer Mnsr Maurice Dooley went so far as to baldly state that had Sean Brady reported Smyth to the civil authorities he would have betrayed his office.

In the past we have seen the church assert that their law, canon law, was superior to the law of the State. We have heard how lies are not really lies if they are told by clergy and Bishops acting the in the interests of their Church or upon the instruction of their Church superiors. Most simply, we have repeatedly heard that they are not subject to the normal rules of morality and a duty to work for the common good.

But it appears that their shame, a shame revealed by force over many difficult years during which they lied to us time and time again and fought us every inch of the way, is in fact, Ireland’s shame.

Ireland and its people have much to be proud of.

Yet every land and its people have moments of shame.

Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this.

For the past sixteen years I have repeatedly made it clear that the abuse inflicted by priests on so many children here in Ireland was a consequence of the actions and failures of not only those who perpetrated the abuse itself, but also of those who knowing they were abusers, gave them access to and power over children. I have also made it clear that we all bear some responsibility for our collective refusal to name what we saw happen in front of our own eyes and in our own communities. Our collective denial of the terrible wrongs we suspected allowed abuse to happen and silenced its victims. The failure of our State to assert its authority over any external agency or power and fulfil its obligation to protect its children and its people from harm is hugely responsible for the brutalisation of countless children and of wider society in ways not yet fully understood.

It seems fitting to mention that in the Parable of the Faithful Servant Christ is reported to have said, “ To whom much has been given, much will be expected”.

The Roman Catholic Church and its leaders, including Cardinal Sean Brady have been given much by this society. We gave them our unquestioned loyalty and devotion for most of our history, our money even when we didn’t have any, we worked to support them in word and in action; we gave our blood, our sweat and our tears in the service of the faith they taught us.

They were the supreme authority in this society since the foundation of the State until very recently. We lauded them, kissed their rings and bowed before them. They have been given much.

And so we have the right to expect much from them. We certainly have the right to expect that when they finally and fully name and accept the scale of their failure and corrupt actions, that they will own them as theirs and not seek to pass them onto us.

Above all we have the right to expect the humility and grace which demands that any such acceptance of failure and corruption not be seen or used as a means through which they could evangelise.

It seems to me, that before they can expect us to believe that they possess any insight into the will of the Holy Spirit or any higher power, they must have developed the capacity to live by the most simple of the rules laid down by the Christ which founded their church. That we respect, care for and love each other and recognise that we must not act to cause each other harm in the service of our hunger for power, position or wealth.

The integrity of our witness to the Gospel challenges us to own up to and take responsibility for any mismanagement or cover-up of child abuse. For the sake of survivors, for the sake of all the Catholic faithful as well as the religious and priests of this country, we have to stop the drip, drip, drip of revelations of failure.

On this point I am in complete agreement with Cardinal Brady. It is time for truth, for openness and for the taking of responsibility.

The Catholic Church in Ireland must immediately disclose the full extent of the measures it took to keep secret the rape and abuse of children. It must reveal exactly how many victims of rape and abuse were sworn to secrecy and who was responsible for ordering this despicable act in each and every case.

It must open its archives and its practices to a full examination by the State to ensure that all which must be revealed about the history of clerical sexual crime is finally and fully known and so that those responsible for crimes of abuse and cover up are properly held to account. And it must reimburse the State for the full cost of this process, we have paid enough for their crimes.

Having done so, those who have been found culpable must step down from any position of power and control and work to restore trust in their institution of that is what they truly seek.

Above all they must demonstrate that their loyalty and fidelity is not to an institution or to a power structure but to truth, justice and the common good.

They can do so by breaking with any attempt by Rome to dodge or evade its central responsibility for centuries of the cover up of clerical crimes. They must prove that they are prepared to name the lies and misrepresentation spouted on an almost daily basis now by a Vatican fighting to dodge responsibility for its overseeing role in the global cover up of crimes against children.

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.

An Opinion piece written for the Irish Daily Star, published March 15 2010

I was nine in 1975. Liam Cosgrave was Taoiseach and Dr Dermot Ryan was Archbishop of Dublin. The Bay City Rollers were topping the music charts and ‘Jaws’ was terrifying cinema goers everywhere. It was a different time and a very different Ireland; one where the power of the Catholic Church was absolute.

Picture a child sitting in a room with three men wearing Roman Collars. One of the three Priests is Fr Sean Brady, a thirty-six year old Professor, teacher and Canon Lawyer.  It’s the second time he and his clerical colleagues have met two children who tell them all they can about how they have been sexually brutalised by another priest, Fr Brendan Smyth. It’s been tough; the children have had to describe things they don’t really have words for. Despite all they have suffered, they are innocents in an Ireland where sex hardly exists, never mind child sexual abuse.

But at least it seems that Fr Brady believes them. Who knows, maybe the fact that they have spoken will mean Fr Smyth won’t be able to hurt any other children. Like many children who have been abused, it’s likely that they carry shame about the abuse, about the dirty nature of the things done to them. But they told the truth to the Priests anyway, because you always have to tell them the truth.

The Priests tell them that they can’t tell anyone about this meeting. They tell them that they have to swear an oath, a promise, to keep all of this secret. So they do, and they never tell, not for years and years and years.

And that’s the thing that really sickens me about this. Secrecy is what allowed those two children to be abused, secrecy is what didn’t let them tell anyone about it and get the help they needed, and secrecy is what allowed Brendan Smyth to rape and abuse dozens more children after Sean Brady and his clerical colleagues washed their hands of what they knew.

Brendan Smyth would go on to abuse and rape across the four provinces of Ireland for almost twenty years after Sean Brady established that he was a paedophile.

Last December Cardinal Sean Brady said that he would resign if a child had been abused as a result of a failure on his part. Well, dozens of children were abused after Brady failed to notify the Gardai about Smyth’s crimes.  In 1997, Smyth admitted he had abused seventy four children, sixty one girls and thirteen boys, between 1958 and 1993.

Cardinal Sean Brady says he was simply following orders when he imposed secrecy on these two brutalised children. I wonder what he has to say to the dozens of other children raped and abused by Smyth because he didn’t have the integrity to break ranks, do the right thing and act to protect them.

Cardinal Sean Brady is unfit to lead any organisation involved in the care and education of children, he should resign.

Yesterday when it was revealed that he had been a church appointed investigator into complaints by two children that had been abused by Fr Brendan Smyth, Cardinal Sean Brady told RTE that he had been following his Bishop’s orders and there were no guidelines for dealing with such investigations at that time.

A statement released by the Cardinals office said:

At the direction of Bishop McKiernan, Fr Brady attended two meetings: in the Dundalk meeting Fr Brady acted as recording secretary for the process involved and in the Ballyjamesduff meeting he asked the questions and recorded the answers given.

At those meetings the complainants signed undertakings, on oath, to respect the confidentiality of the information gathering process. As instructed, and as a matter of urgency, Fr Brady passed both reports to Bishop McKiernan for his immediate action.

Note the two references to “the process” and “the information gathering process”.  It was clearly a formal catholic church process of investigation in which Cardinal Brady, as an expert canon lawyer, played an important role.

He recorded the evidence gathered from both child victims and also questioned them as part of the “process”. This is acknowledged by the Cardinal himself.

Both of the child victims questioned by Sean Brady and his clerical colleagues were required to sign a formal undertaking, under oath, that they would not disclose the meetings or their complaints to the church to anyone.

The Sunday Times reported earlier today that the hearings with the two children:

…were presided over by three canon lawyers and examined formal complaints that Smyth had sexually abused a teenage girl and, separately, an altar boy during church-related activities. Smyth was accused of sexually assaulting the boy, then aged 10, while on holiday in west Cork. The girl said the priest first abused her around Easter 1970, when she was 14.

Both the boy and the girl were required to sign affidavits swearing that they would not talk to anybody except priests given special permission by the tribunal hearings, known in church parlance as “ecclesiastical proceedings”.

All of this sounds very much like the process laid down in Crimen Sollicitationis, the 1962 Vatican document found by the Ferns Inquiry to be church policy on how to deal with clerical child sexual abuse.

It is clear that Brady and his co-inquisitors who investigated these cases were following a formal process and it seems clear that this process was not remotely concerned with the protection of children.

No report of Smyth’s crimes against these two children was made by Sean Brady or the church to any civil authority.

Today Brady has tried to defend his behaviour by suggesting that the investigation did result in action being taken against Smyth.  Link here.

He said that he had acted – by being part of a process which resulted in Fr Smyth having his licence to practice as a priest removed.

Cardinal Brady said that three weeks after he had submitted a report to the then Bishop of Kilmore, Bishop Francis McKiernan, Smyth was suspended from practicing as a priest in the Diocese of Kilmore and throughout the country.

I have to say that I find myself unsure about which might be worse; that Cardinal Sean Brady might actually believe this self-serving nonsense or that it might be no more than cynical spin and misrepresentation designed to dodge responsibility for a gross failure to protect children.

Whatever the case by any reasonable standard Brady and all others involved failed utterly to ensure that children were protected from a now known paedophile.

In 1975 Sean Brady knew that Brendan Smyth was a paedophile and knew that he had abused these two children. His silence at the time and in the almost twenty years that followed is unforgivable. In 1997, Berndan Smyth pleaded guilty to 62 charges of sexual assault on girls and boys between 1958 and 1991. He also pleaded guilty to 12 charges of sexual assaults on boys and girls between 1991 and 1993. He committed the assaults in nine counties spread over the four provinces of Ireland. Sixty one of his victims were girls and thirteen were boys.

Cardinal Sean Brady’s personal failure to report Smyth to the Gardai or to Social Services is part of the gross failure by the Church which allowed so many young lives to be torn apart by acts of sexual brutality.

There is no way to spin these established facts which can allow any rational human being to come to any other conclusion.

When asked earlier today why he had not contacted the relevant statutory authorities, Cardinal Brady said that he was not the designated person to do so.

“Not the designated person to do so”…so the obvious question has to be just who was the designated person to do so, given Brad’s suggestion only yesterday that there were no guidelines in place to handle such issues?

And even more pointedly, how could a highly-educated thirty-six year old man, a teacher, professor and canon lawyer, not realise that he had a clear responsibility to report what were serious crimes to the police and other authorities?

Taking this forward to the current day one has to seriously question the fitness of Cardinal Brady to hold such a senior role in an organisation responsible for the education and care of many thousands of children given that he feels his conduct in 1975 was acceptable and does not amount to a personal failure.

When asked if he was going to resign he said that he would not because he did not think it was a resigning matter.

In December 2009 he said that he would resign if any failure on his part had led to a child being abused.

That his failure to report Smyth meant that this known serial child abuser went on to rape and abuse dozens more children after Brady and his co-inquisitors washed their hands of the case is beyond dispute.

Enough spin and manipulation, its time he went.

Given his admission that he was represented the Catholic Church at a meeting in 1975 where two child victims of serial paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth were required to swear oaths of secrecy about their abuse by Smyth, Cardinal Sean Brady must now resign.

In December 2009 Cardinal Brady told RTE that he would resign if a child had been abused as a result of a failure on his part :

“I would remember that child sex abuse is a very serious crime and very grave and if I found myself in a situation where I was aware that my failure to act had allowed or meant that other children were abused, well then, I think I would resign.”

Link here.

So we know that Sean Brady was a church investigator into complaints that Smyth had abused children in 1975.  By his own admission he believed the victims and believed that Smyth had abused them. But it appears he failed to report those crimes to the police or any state authority.

It seems clear that he didn’t report it in 1975 or at any point over the next nineteen years. Smyth was finally arrested in 1994 after other victims of his reported their abuse to the police.

And we know Smyth continued to abuse girls and boys for many years after this gross failure by Sean Brady in his role as church representative in the 1975 investigation.

Cardinal Daly said tonight he had been following his Bishop’s orders and there were no guidelines for dealing with such investigations at that time.

This is untrue.

As found by the Ferns Inquiry there was church policy setting out how such cases were to be handled.

…in 1962 Pope John XXIII issued a special procedural law for the processing of solicitation cases. The document was sent to a number of Bishops throughout the world who were directed to keep it in secret archives and not to publish or comment upon it. This document related specifically to solicitation in the course of hearing Confession. It is of interest to the Inquiry as it also specifically dealt with how priests who abused children were to be handled and imposed a high degree of secrecy on all Church officials involved in such cases. The penalty for breach of this secrecy was automatic excommunication. Even witnesses and complainants could be excommunicated if they broke the oath of secrecy.

This is the first document from the Vatican of which the Inquiry is aware which directs bishops on the handling of child abuse allegations. The code of secrecy which was emphasised in the document has been perceived by the media and members of the general public as informing the Church authorities on how allegations of child sexual abuse should be dealt with.

Page 13, The Ferns Report

The Catholic Church has repeatedly denied that this document, Crimen Sollicitationis, is not related to clerical child sexual abuse despite this finding by former Irish Supreme Court Judge Mr Justice Frank Murphy who headed the Ferns Inquiry.

Now it would appear that the requiring an oath of secrecy from victims of abuse as laid out in Crimen Sollicitationis was used in the 1975 investigation of complaints into child abuse by Smyth.  And involved in the process was the man who would become Cardinal and Primate of All Ireland, Sean Brady.

Whatever his youth, experience of supposed innocence back in 1975, I do not find his defence of ‘I was following orders’ remotely satisfactory.

He believed that this out of control paedophile had abused children and he did nothing to report this crime to the police either then, or it would appear, at any point over the next twenty years during which Smyth continued to rape and abuse in parishes across the world with near impunity. Instead he took part in a cover up of Smyth’s crimes and swore his child victims to secrecy.

Cardinal Sean Brady is now deeply personally implicated in the gross failures of the Catholic Church in the management of Smyth and his rampant sexual offending against children.

And on that basis and given his statement of December 2009 he must resign.

Below is the text of the statement issued by Cardinal Brady’s office this evening.

‘In 1975, Fr Sean Brady, as he then was, was the part-time secretary to the then Bishop of Kilmore, the late Bishop Francis McKiernan.

At the direction of Bishop McKiernan, Fr Brady attended two meetings: in the Dundalk meeting Fr Brady acted as recording secretary for the process involved and in the Ballyjamesduff meeting he asked the questions and recorded the answers given.

At those meetings the complainants signed undertakings, on oath, to respect the confidentiality of the information gathering process. As instructed, and as a matter of urgency, Fr Brady passed both reports to Bishop McKiernan for his immediate action.’

So today Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and Cardinal Sean Bready met with Pope Benedict XVI to discuss the report of the Commission of Investigation into clerical sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Dublin.

After their meeting the Vatican issued the following statement:

Today the Holy Father held a meeting with senior Irish Bishops and high-ranking members of the Roman Curia. He listened to their concerns and discussed with them the traumatic events that were presented in the Irish Commission of Investigation’s into the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin

After careful study of the Report, the Holy Father was deeply disturbed and distressed by its contents. He wishes once more to express his profound regret at the actions of some members of the clergy who have betrayed their solemn promises to God, as well as the trust placed in them by the victims and their families, and by society at large.

The Holy Father shares the outrage, betrayal and shame felt by so many of the faithful in Ireland, and he is united with them in prayer at this difficult time in the life of the Church.

His Holiness asks Catholics in Ireland and throughout the world to join him in praying for the victims, their families and all those affected by these heinous crimes.

He assures all concerned that the Church will continue to follow this grave matter with the closest attention in order to understand better how these shameful events came to pass and how best to develop effective and secure strategies to prevent any recurrence.

The Holy See takes very seriously the central issues raised by the Report, including questions concerning the governance of local Church leaders with ultimate responsibility for the pastoral care of children.

The Holy Father intends to address a Pastoral Letter to the faithful of Ireland in which he will clearly indicate the initiatives that are to be taken in response to the situation.

Finally, His Holiness encourages all those who have dedicated their lives in generous service to children to persevere in their good works in imitation of Christ the Good Shepherd.

His statement has not exactly been lauded. For obvious reasons.

The suggestion that the Pope was “deeply disturbed and distressed”  by the content of the report is pretty ambigious to say the least. Benedict XVI was for more than twenty years the head of the Congregation for the Doctorine of the Faith (CDF), when he was Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. In this capacity he headed the Vatican department which was responsible for the management of abuse cases right across the global Roman Catholic Church.

In 2001 he wrote to every Bishop in the world in May 2001 instructing them on how they were to handle cases of child sexual abuse by priests. The letter stated that the CDF would “continue to have exclusive competence” for how cases were to be handled. Note the word “continue” here, as in it alreaday was the entity with exclusive competence to decide how cases were to be handled.

The letter said the CDF was to be informed about all cases of priests who sexually abused children and asserted the church’s right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and kep the evidence confidential for up to ten years after the victim reached adultood. Link to news coverage here.

So Pope Benedict XVI has detailed personal expereince of managing the issue of clerical sexual abuse for many years, at the global level. He is fully aware of the scale of the problem and is the source of the document about which the Commission of Investigation wrote to both the Papal Nuncio and the Vatican in an effort to discover the nature of the church cover up of abuse in Dublin. The Vatican and the Papal Nuncio, the Pope’s ambassador to Ireland, both failed to even reply to the letters from the Commission. Link here to that story.

Any expression of surprise or outrage by the Pope on reading the report of the commission is disingenuous in the extreme. He can not be surprised by either the scale and nature of the abuse, or more importantly, the deliberate cover up of the absue by the Archdiocese and its Archbishops and Bishops over many decades.

What is especially outrageous is the suggestion that the Pope shares the “outrage, betrayal and shame felt by many of the faithful in Ireland”. Isn’t it obscene that the leader of this global church who has personally previously dicated a policy of secrecy in the handling of abuse by priests. So how has he been betrayed exactly? Is he himself guilty of a staggering betrayal of children and members of the church he now leads?

It is frankly sickening that the Pope is portaying himself as a victim in this context.

It is interesting though to read how the Vatican, and the Pope, have clearly decided to place the bleame for the cover up identified by the Commission fully on the Irish church authorities. Given that every bishop is directly and solely accountable to the Pope, and that in 2001 the Pope, in his previous role with the CDF, directed the approach national churches and individual bishops were to adopt in managing complaints of abuse by priests it seems clear that he, and the Vatican share responsibilit with national or local church authorities.

The undertaking to continue to work to “understand better how these shameful events came to pass and how best to develop effective and secure strategies to prevent any recurrence” is also galling.

The Roman Catholic Church has been aware of paedophilia in its ranks almost since its foundation. As I detailed in my book Beyond Belief, Church history is littered with references to previous scandals and church law going back as fard as the first century AD. Just how long does the Church need to understand its own actions?

Much more detailed information on this history is documented in the excellent Sex, Priests and Secret Codes by Tom Doyle, Richard Sipe and Patrick Wall.

Finally, the suggestion that those of us affected by this cover up and these apalling crimes might gain somekind of comfort from the announcement that the Pope will now write a pastoral letter to the Irish demonstrates an appalling arrogance on the part of the Vatican.

We don’t need a letter, announced in breathless excitement by Archbishop Martin.

We don’t need any more papal expressions of regret at the actions of some priests and clergy.

The only thing we need is the truth.

Admit the nature and scale of the cover up. Get real, tell the truth and take responsibility.

Try and be at least a little Christ-like in your response to the deliberate and wilfull disregard of the welfare of children by the church you head, and then, and only then, you might begin to deal with this issue in a meaningful way.

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.