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.’

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.

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.