Tuesday, August 25, 2009

PATRICK CLAFFEY

RITE AND REASON: THIS YEAR the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin is celebrating a year of evangelisation. The project’s website notes that “evangelisation is . . . an essential mission of the church”.

Necessary, courageous, no doubt, but, one might well ask the question, “why now?”

A friend told me, several years ago, of a conversation he had with a prominent Irish bishop whose diocese had the first exposure of an abuse scandal. “With this, what time do you think I have left for evangelisation?” asked the forlorn pastor. But worse was to come.

In recent times, it can be argued, the Catholic Church in Ireland has reached the nadir of its long history on this island. This institution is paying the price for its past success and for the kind of clerical dominance that almost inevitably leads to arrogance and the abuse of power.

Is it entering a land of exile?

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By Conor Ryan, Political Correspondent

Monday, August 24, 2009

THE author of the report on institutional child abuse has said the country will be tested by how it deals with the fallout from the inquiry’s revelations.

Mr Justice Sean Ryan, chairman of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, also said but for the tenacity and courage of the victims, their horrific treatment at the hands of religious orders would never have come to light.

He said the ability of the perpetrators to get away with their crimes reflected wider problems.

“It says a lot about our society, institutions and our systems in the past that these events happened.

“It will also say a lot about our present situation as to how we respond to the disclosure of these events.”

Mr Justice Ryan made his comments when accepting the Humbert Award, which was given to him in recognition of the work the Commission had done.

It was his first public statement since the shocking results of the inquiry were published in May. He said now the report was in the public domain it was up to society at large to ensure it effected the necessary change. “Our work is there to be seen, to be analysed, to be discussed, debated and reflected upon. This is the best report we could make.

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Monday August 24 2009

IT was a far cry from that bleak May day when survivors of institutional abuse were not admitted to the long-awaited news conference in a Dublin hotel at which Mr Justice Sean Ryan published his damning report into systematic abuse of children by religious orders in State run institutions.

At the weekend, three months later, Judge Ryan stood side by side for a family photograph with representatives of survivors’ groups and journalist Mary Raftery, whose documentary, ‘Suffer Little Children’, first alerted the public to the scale of child abuse in what was known as “Catholic Ireland”.

The judiciary, the abused and the media came together in the Co Mayo market town of Ballina to receive special awards presented on behalf of the Humbert Summer School by its honorary president, John Hume, the peacemaker in Northern Ireland and Nobel Laureate.

Saturday on the banks of the rain-swollen River Moy was a day of remarkable salmon leaps in the torrential saga of state and media probing into what has become known as ‘the Irish disease’.

In his first public appearance since his explosive findings were made public, Judge Ryan paid a moving tribute to “the courage and fortitude” of the abused, whose horrendous evidence about their experiences as children is now permanently recorded in the landmark report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, which he chaired. Judge Ryan did not hold back from giving full credit to the residents of State institutions for bringing to light “events which were shrouded in darkness for so long”.

In turn, survivor Michael O’Brien, the former mayor of Clonmel who captured the nation’s imagination by challenging the platitudes of Government minister Noel Dempsey on an unforgettable RTE ‘Questions and Answers’ programme, bowed to the good judge and thanked him “for the momentous work you and your team have done”. But Mr O’Brien was only prepared to give conditional pardon to the religious congregations who locked up him and thousands of other children in penal institutions as serfs. He will forgive his oppressors only when he knows in his heart that “these people mean it when they say ‘we are really, really sorry’.”

“I do not want silly apologies. I want to see repentance,” he said.

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Why is it that child sex abuse was more prevalent in Irish Catholicism than elsewhere? To answer that question it is necessary to go back to the Famine and examine how sex became a taboo, writes PATSY McGARRY

YOU MIGHT have seen that report on the RTÉ TV news last Monday from Charlie Bird in Mendham, New Jersey. There, they erected the first monument in the world to victims of clerical child sex abuse.

It is a 180kg basalt stone, in the shape of a millstone, with a chain running through it. An inscription attached reads, in those unequivocal words of Jesus from Matthew’s gospel, concerning those who would harm the young: “It would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened round his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea”.

The monument was inspired by a suicide, in October 12th, 2003, of 37-year-old James Kelly, who had been sexually abused as a child by a priest in Mendham. His abuser was Fr James Hanley, who had served at St Joseph’s parish in Mendham.

It is not surprising that the first monument to clerical child sex abuse victims worldwide should have been made necessary by the crimes of a priest with an Irish name.

Irish names are prominent wherever in the English-speaking world clerical child sex abuse has been spoken of. Even allowing for the uniquely high number of Irish men among Catholic priests and religious worldwide, this phenomenon is striking.

Nowhere else in the Roman Catholic world has another nationality been as dominant among clerical child sex abusers. What was so different about Irish Catholicism that it gave rise to this?

In spring 2002, I was commissioned by the editor of an English publication to write about clerical child sex abuse from an Irish perspective. I pondered whether it was an Irish disease.

On receipt of the article the editor said he couldn’t print it. His publication had spent decades trying to escape an anti-Irish perception and were he to carry the article it would undo all their success in finally escaping that, he said. The article was published in The Irish Times on May 4th, 2002.

It noted all those Irish names among clerical child sex abusers. In Australia, they included Butler, Claffey, Cleary, Coffey, Connolly, Cox, Farrell, Fitzmaurice, Flynn, Gannon, Jordan, Keating, McGrath, McNamara, Murphy, Nestor, O’Brien, O’Donnell, O’Regan, O’Rourke, Riley, Ryan, Shea, Sullivan, Sweeney, Taylor, Treacy.

In Canada: Brown, Corrigan, Hickey, Kelley, O’Connor, Kenney, Maher.

In the US: Geoghan, Birmingham, Brown, Brett, Conway, Dunn, Hanley, Hughes, Lenehan, McEnany, O’Connor, O’Grady, O’Shea, Riley, Ryan, Shanley.

In the UK: Dooley, Flahive, Jordan, Murphy, O’Brien.

And, of course, all those in Ireland itself.

WHY IS CLERICAL child sex abuse more prevalent in Irish Catholicism? To answer that, it is necessary to go back. Until 1845 the Irish were a happily sexually active people. With an abundance of cheap food, the population grew. Patches of ground were subdivided with ever-decreasing acreage, producing a sufficient supply of potatoes.

In 1841, the island of Ireland had a population of 8.1 million. By 1961, the country having gone through the Famine and emigration, it was 4.2 million.

Another effect was an end to subdivision of holdings and diversification away from the potato to other crops, cattle and dairying. This wrench in land use had a defining effect on Irish sexuality. An economic imperative dictated vigorous sexual restraint as, regardless of family size, just one son would inherit. Others – sons and daughters – emigrated or entered the church. This late 19th-century pattern persisted into the 1960s.

Sex became taboo. Allied to prudery and a Catholic Church fixated on sex as sin, sensuality was pushed under. A celibate elite became the noblest caste. They had unparalleled influence through their dominance of an emerging middle class, the fact that they were educated when most were not, and the control they had over what there was of an education system and healthcare.

In tandem, Rome was experiencing one of its most dogmatic papacies under Pius IX. The longest serving pope (1846-1878), he lost the Papal States and eventually Rome itself to Italian reunification. As his temporal power decreased, he increasingly emphasised the eternal, and compounded a trend – extant in Catholicism since the French revolution – of alienation from this vale of tears.

Life became a test, a preparation for death and eternal life under the eye of what Archbishop Diarmuid Martin described last weekend in another context as “a punitive, judgmental God; a God whose love was the love of harsh parents, where punishment became the primary instrument of love”.

Pius asserted himself in Ireland through the doughty Cardinal Paul Cullen of Dublin, the first Irish cardinal. He received the red hat from Pius in 1866. Cullen shaped the traditional Irish Catholicism with its emphasis on devotional practice, which dominated at home and abroad into the latter part of the 20th century.

As well as preaching absolute loyalty to Rome (Pius promulgated the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in 1870) the Vatican’s celibate foot soldiers preached chastity as the greatest virtue. Irish women were expected to emulate the Virgin Mary. In 1854, Pius IX promulgated the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception – that Mary was born without original sin – embedding still further in the popular Irish Catholic mind a profound association between sex and sin.

The clergy preached that celibate life was superior to married life; that sexual activity outside marriage was evil and even within where the intention was not procreation. Sexual pleasure was taboo, powerful evidence of an inferior animal nature that constantly threatened what was divine in the human.

The sermons of Irish Catholic clergy for most of the 120 years between 1850 and 1970 seemed dominated by sex. This railing, allied to a world view that saw the economic business of this earth as inferior activity in the eternal scheme of things, had inevitable consequences. Poverty and chastity saw to it that the marriage rate plummeted.

By 1926, for instance, the percentage of unmarried females in each age cohort was 50 per cent higher than in England and Wales and nearly three times as great as in the US. By 1961 the population of the Republic had dropped to 2.8 million.

The bachelor had become as integral a part of Irish life as the husband. So too had the spinster, with her penchant for overwrought piety. The Irish mother was totally dependent on her husband economically. It ensured an appalling time for some Irish women, as the absolute power of the husband was liberally abused in many homes. It drove many Irish mothers to seek solace in a higher purpose.

This often translated into a son becoming a priest. Nothing could bring such consolation to the devout Irish Catholic mother – whether in Ireland or abroad – as seeing her son with a Roman collar around his neck. It was said of Ireland’s seminaries during the middle decades of the last century that they were full of young men whose mothers had vocations to the priesthood. It helped that becoming a priest brought with it great power and status.

In 1954, a book, The Vanishing Irish: The Enigma of the Modern World , by John A O’Brien, was published in London. It questioned Ireland’s dramatic depopulation. Simultaneously the number of Irish Catholic clergy reached its highest level ever. In 1956, there were 5,489 priests in Ireland (diocesan and members of religious orders) – one for every 593 Catholics. There were also 18,300 nuns and Christian Brothers. Vocations were so high that between a third and a half of clergy went on the missions.
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Suzanne Breen in Paris

One of Ireland’s best-known priests has called on the Catholic church to halt recruitment to the priesthood until it has properly addressed the issue of clerical child abuse.

Fr Aidan Troy accused the church of “a wholly inadequate response to the horrendous abuse that has been uncovered”. He said the hierarchy must “take radical action rather than engage in window dressing”. The church here should ask the pope to visit Ireland to publicly apologise for the destruction of children’s lives, he said.

Troy came to prominence as parish priest of Holy Cross in north Belfast. For three months, he walked with the Ardoyne schoolchildren and their parents past a violent loyalist protest.
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One of the country’s leading summer schools is to honour victims of clerical child abuse.

The Humbert Summer Schoolin Co Mayo will also give commemorative awards to investigative journalist Mary Raftery, who helped uncover the scale of the scandal in institutions and Judge Sean Ryan who headed the long-running inquiry into church and state run schools and reformatories.

The awards will be presented by Nobel Peace Laureate and school president, John Hume, during a day-long debate on child protection.

Humbert School director John Cooney said the honour will mark contributions of the Commission, the long hard campaign of survivors to have their testimonies believed and Ms Raffery’s documentaries which alerted the public to the extent of child abuse.

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EITHNE DONNELLAN

GROUPS REPRESENTING survivors of abuse in industrial schools have warned the Government it must not allow the verification of the financial standing of religious congregations to become a lengthy affair.

The verification concerns those congregations which promised further redress to victims following the publication of the Ryan report in May.

Following a meeting of the groups in Dublin yesterday, John Kelly of Irish Survivors of Child Abuse said the Government was prepared for a “long drawn-out process” with the religious to establish their assets and to determine what could or could not be released to the victims.

But he warned victims would not stand for that. “We are saying to the Government they need to be more robust and they need to be more urgent about what needs to be done,” he said.

The Government appointed a three-person panel at the end of last month to assess the statements of resources submitted by religious congregations following publication of the Commission of Inquiry into Child Abuse.

The panel, chaired by Frank Daly, former chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, has no specific deadline.

Michael O’Brien of Right to Peace and a former mayor of Clonmel, who spoke movingly about the abuse he suffered at Ferryhouse industrial school near the town, said it was of “serious concern” that the panel had no deadline by which they would have to report.

“This should take a matter of weeks rather than months. It’s a matter of serious concern that they have no timeframe because we have endured 10 years of waiting and suffering for all this to come to an end.

“We want to see this coming to an end soon so we may get closure, which is very important to us all,” Mr O’Brien said.

“I call on the Taoiseach to put a timeframe on it now.”

Mr Kelly said that he was anxious to ensure the panel had real teeth and was able to go after offshore assets held by the religious orders.
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