Mar

30

Abuse victim’s brother plans altar protest during Easter Sunday Mass

Filed Under Child Abuse | 33 Comments

By Caroline O’Doherty

Tuesday, March 30, 2010 The Irish Examiner.

THE brother of a man abused at an industrial school is planning an altar protest during communion at one of the biggest Catholic churches in the country on the most important day in the church’s calendar.

Kevin Flanagan, whose late brother Michael was a survivor of the Artane Industrial School in the 1950s, plans to lead protesters to the altar in Dublin’s Pro-Cathedral during the 11am Mass on Easter Sunday to lay children’s shoes as symbols of the children hurt by priests and religious-run institutions.

Michael Flanagan was 14 when a Christian Brother attacked him with a sweeping brush, breaking his arm. The incident gave rise to a Dáil debate in 1954 after the Brothers refused to let the boy’s mother see him and a local TD asked the then education minister to intervene.

Despite the publicity, there was no inquiry and the Christian Brother who carried out the attack was moved to another school.

The Ryan Report on institutional child abuse last year highlighted the case as an example of the order’s failures towards the children in its care.

Kevin Flanagan said his brother was traumatised after his experiences in Artane and drank heavily, dying alone in England at the age of 59.

He believes the Ryan Report did not go far enough in its criticisms.

He also says the hierarchy have failed to respond adequately to the subsequent Murphy Report into abuse by priests in the Dublin Archdiocese.

“We’re calling for an international criminal investigation into the Catholic Church in Ireland. We need investigators from abroad to come in and get the full story. I have a petition with 5,000 names of people supporting that call.”

Mr Flanagan said his protest would be peaceful but it was intended to be noticed. “I’m asking everyone in the congregation to join in and if people can’t make the Pro-Cathedral, then they should tie shoes to the railings of their own local church.”

The Pro-Cathedral is the parish church of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin and his predecessor, Cardinal Desmond Connell, who has yet to speak publicly about the Murphy Report’s criticisms of his time in charge of the Dublin Archdiocese.

The archdiocese said it hoped people’s right to worship would be respected. A spokeswoman said: “The diocese has ongoing discussions with survivors groups and their issues and concerns are well known to us.”

Mar

29

Yup, we need a Nope.

Filed Under Child Abuse | 4 Comments

A nun who is pope.

The Catholic Church can never recover as long as its Holy Shepherd is seen as a black sheep in the ever-darkening sex abuse scandal.

Now we learn the sickening news that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, nicknamed “God’s Rottweiler” when he was the church’s enforcer on matters of faith and sin, ignored repeated warnings and looked away in the case of the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy, a Wisconsin priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys.

The church has been tone deaf and dumb on the scandal for so long that it’s shocking, but not surprising, to learn from The Times’s Laurie Goodstein that a group of deaf former students spent 30 years trying to get church leaders to pay attention.

“Victims give similar accounts of Father Murphy’s pulling down their pants and touching them in his office, his car, his mother’s country house, on class excursions and fund-raising trips and in their dormitory beds at night,” Goodstein wrote. “Arthur Budzinski said he was first molested when he went to Father Murphy for confession when he was about 12, in 1960.”

It was only when the sanctity of the confessional was breached that an archbishop in Wisconsin (who later had to resign when it turned out he used church money to pay off a male lover) wrote to Cardinal Ratzinger at the Vatican to request that Father Murphy be defrocked.

The cardinal did not answer. The archbishop wrote to a different Vatican official, but Father Murphy appealed to Cardinal Ratzinger for leniency and got it, partly because of the church’s statute of limitations. Since when does sin have a statute of limitations?

The pope is in too deep. He has proved himself anything but infallible. And now he claims he was uninformed on the matter of an infamous German pedophile priest. A spokesman for the Munich archdiocese said on Friday that Ratzinger, running the diocese three decades ago, would not have read the memo sent to him about Father Peter Hullermann’s getting cycled back into work with children because between 700 to 1,000 memos go to the archbishop each year.

Let’s see. That’s two or three memos a day. And Ratzinger was renowned at the Vatican for poring through voluminous, recondite theological treatises.

Because he did not defrock the demented Father Murphy, it’s time to bring in the frocks.

Pope Benedict has continued the church’s ban on female priests and is adamant against priests’ having wives. He has started two investigations of American nuns to check on their “quality of life” — code for seeing if they’ve grown too independent. As a cardinal he wrote a Vatican document urging women to be submissive partners and not take on adversarial roles toward men.

But the completely paternalistic and autocratic culture of Il Papa led to an insular, exclusionary system that failed to police itself, and that became a corrosive shelter for secrets and shame.

If the church could throw open its stained glass windows and let in some air, invite women to be priests, nuns to be more emancipated and priests to marry, if it could banish criminal priests and end the sordid culture of men protecting men who attack children, it might survive. It could be an encouraging sign of humility and repentance, a surrender of arrogance, both moving and meaningful.

Cardinal Ratzinger devoted his Vatican career to rooting out any hint of what he considered deviance. The problem is, he was obsessed with enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy and somehow missed the graver danger to the most vulnerable members of the flock.

The sin-crazed “Rottweiler” was so consumed with sexual mores — issuing constant instructions on chastity, contraception, abortion — that he didn’t make time for curbing sexual abuse by priests who were supposed to pray with, not prey on, their young charges.

American bishops have gotten politically militant in recent years, opposing the health care bill because its language on abortion wasn’t vehement enough, and punishing Catholic politicians who favor abortion rights and stem cell research. They should spend as much time guarding the kids already under their care as they do championing the rights of those who aren’t yet born.

Decade after decade, the church hid its sordid crimes, enabling the collared perpetrators instead of letting the police collar them. In the case of the infamous German priest, one diocese official hinted that his problem could be fixed by transferring him to teach at a girls’ school. Either they figured that he would not be tempted by the female sex, or worse, the church was even less concerned about putting little girls at risk.

The nuns have historically cleaned up the messes of priests. And this is a historic mess. Benedict should go home to Bavaria. And the cardinals should send the white smoke up the chimney, proclaiming “Habemus Mama.”

Mar

27

Church must respect State law ahead of its own rules

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 15 Comments

Bruce Arnold

We have reached a point of surfeit over abuse. The story spreads worldwide, now involving Germany, South America, the United States again, with the Milwaukee revelations. There are constant fresh episodes here We can always trump what happens elsewhere with worse here. If it is deaf children, we had worse in Ireland where boys were sexually abused over decades, and the girls suffered mindless cruelty.

Disabled children? The same. We allowed a massive culture of abuse to develop, the Church part of it, but by no means the whole, since the people, together with their guardians – the State, the Law and the Police – simply allowed it to happen. Even today, politicians, including party leaders, are ignoring their role in putting right deeply flawed social structures that have failed.

The public appetite has become choked with stories from the abuse saga. With notable exceptions it is largely relegated to ‘inside pages’. The media is running out of language.

Abuse is history. Material facts continue to be unearthed but from the past and shrouded in perpetually dishonest excuses by the Church, claiming it was not clear about what abuse meant and why it happened.

As a child at school in the 1940s I read about abuse in The People and the News of the World. I was advised by my father to avoid men with beards! The predatory nature of adult sexual desire for children was recognised and warned against. Prison sentences were published. Even in Ireland the crime was known. Dermot Ferriter, in his 2009 History of Ireland, writes: ‘cases [of child abuse] were reported in newspapers, though the language used was often circumspect and barristers had a tendency to announce they would not ‘go into the gruesome details’.

What is exceptional to this is the law. It is part of the present. It is reality and not just history; it is the duty of the lawmakers to ensure that it remains up to date. It is their duty to address it, reform it and change it. It must accommodate what it failed to accommodate throughout the State’s history.

On abuse, the law has been a shy handmaiden to the Church, fobbed off with the idea that an alternative law, the one administered and shaped by the Vatican, was a suitable protection for children. It has proved the opposite. Rather than protect children it has been their insidious enemy. In Ireland the extent is infinitely greater than in other countries because the lawmakers and those who implement the law have accepted the Church’s rule in the State and have largely failed to use civil and criminal law as it was made to be used, against grievous and sustained criminal behaviour by generation after generation of priests and others.

This issue, of there being two laws operating in the State, one managed and applied by the Church, the other by our courts and the police, requires to be digested and its elements fundamentally reformed. And to do this we need to separate it from the abuse saga, isolate it as an ongoing problem, debate it and bring in a new charter for change and reform.

Unless we do so, Canon Law will remain in operation as the Church’s first resort, impeding total transparency and immediate reporting of the abuse that has so riveted attention, yet has done so in a singularly distorted way.

In a speech last Saturday Alan Shatter put this situation in the context of the Children’s Rights Amendment to the Constitution, really only a starting point. People are not easily governed by the Constitution; they need laws to underpin its principles. And this is emphatically so over the state of the law in respect of child abuse.

Shatter comments: ‘there has been an eerie and deafening silence from government’. He goes on: ‘To date the government has neither expressed support for the proposed amendment nor specified a date for the holding of the required referendum.’

‘Leave it to the Church to sort itself out’ is the approach of politicians.

We are dealing, as this notably outspoken public representative has repeatedly told us, with ‘saga-length’ scandal, with lip-service and with failure, both by the State and the Roman Catholic Church. The reforms needed are crucial and go beyond constitutional amendment. They affect the law in detail and in substance, yet no Cabinet Minister from the Taoiseach down contributed to the recent Dail debate on the proposed constitutional change, and this included the Minister for Justice, who was a member of the Children’s Rights Committee, and has been vocal about not allowing the clerical collar to be a defence of abusers. Notably absent also was Paul Gogarty of the Green Party, paid €20,000 year to chair the Joint Oireachtas Education Committee yet present for four meetings out of 62 of the Children’s rights committee, according to Shatter.

What we need is a Commission of Inquiry, with this brief: To look into the broken and ignored relationship between the pre-eminence of State law and the confusion in State law created by the widespread respect for Canon Law. Such a commission would need a short timetable and its remit confined. It should consist of a small group group drawn from Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Nuala O’Loan comes to mind as well as Maurice Hayes. The S.D.L.P. politician, Declan O’Loan is another sensible candidate. In recent criticism of the Pope’s letter he expressed disappointment it did not address or analyse ‘what went wrong and why it went wrong’. He repudiates ‘the very unhealthy culture of centralised clerical power within the Church and the attendant secrecy. If that is not even admitted, what hope is there of correcting it thoroughly?’ He invokes the need, in the light of the Pope’s proposed ‘visitation’, to define whether or not this should be backed by State intervention.

Not many politicians in the South have come anywhere near saying this.

‘I find it embarrassing that, in many historical instances, the lead in developing human rights has come from secular society rather than from the Church. Indeed it has often been achieved against opposition by the Church. Once again in this area of responding to child abuse, despite the strongest imperative, the Church appears to be slow to move in a necessary direction.’ We need a Commission to define this in brave, forthright and unequivocal terms.

Irish Independent 27th March 2010

barnold@independent.ie

Mar

26

Pope is at centre of Vatican abuse cover-up’, says Hans Küng

Filed Under Child Abuse | 7 Comments

The Times, London March 25, 2010

Roger Boyes, Berlin

One of Europe’s leading theological thinkers has accused the Pope of being complicit in a Vatican cover-up of child abuse scandals in the Roman Catholic Church.

“No one in the whole of the Catholic Church knows as much about abuse cases – knowledge that is ex officio, derived from his office,” Hans Küng said in an interview with Swiss television.

Professor Küng – a long-standing critic of the Vatican – said that the Pope’s involvement in hiding clerical molestation of children dated back at least to his 24 years as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of
the Faith in Rome .

“This Vatican authority has for a long time centralised [information about] all abuse cases so that they can be concealed, classified as top secret,” the 82-year old Swiss theologian said.

He has been a close observer of Joseph Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict XVI – since they were theology professors at the University of Tübingen in the 1960s. Both were theological advisers to the Second Vatican Council, which concluded in 1965.

Professor Küng’s clinching piece of documentary evidence against his old university colleague is contained in a diocesal letter, dated March 18, 2001, on child abuse, “De delictis gravioribus” (“about serious offences”). Signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the document establishes guidelines for dealing with priests suspected of abuse:

“In tribunals established by ordinaries or hierarchs, the functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests. When the trial in the
tribunal is finished in any fashion, all the acts of the case are to be transmitted ex officio as soon as possible to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” it says.

Professor Küng argues that the Pope is acting hypocritically by calling bishops to order because for the past ten years such offences have been officially regulated behind closed doors.

“He cannot now wag his finger at the bishops and say ‘you did not do enough!’ He gave the instructions himself – as boss of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and again as Pope.”

The Vatican has argued that it is a serious misunderstanding to cast the 2001 document as part of the Church’s supposed “culture of silence”.

A German church official tried to play down Professor Küng’s utterances, arguing in essence that the theologian has “form” with the Pope.

After their stint in Tübingen together, Hans Küng and Joseph Ratzinger went separate ways: Professor Ratzinger, upset at the radical questioning of doctrine during the 1968 student disturbances, moved to
the more conservative Regensburg; Professor Küng began openly to question the infallibility of the Pope and urge a discussion about the celibacy of priests.

In 1979 the Vatican stripped him of his right to teach Catholic theology.

But Professor Küng remains a morally powerful figure in Europe – even Tony Blair came to Tübingen to pay his respects – and his highlighting of the 2001 document has fed into a public debate in Germany about how
much the Pope knows personally about the abuse cases.

Only 17 per cent of Germans still trust the Catholic Church, according to a study by the FORSA sampling institute. At the end of January, 29 per cent of Germans trusted the Church and 38 per cent trusted the
Bavarian-born Pope Benedict.

“Abuse: what did the Pope know?” was the front page headline of Der Tagesspiegel on Thursday – next to a picture of the 2001 document.

It is clear that the Pope certainly knew about the practice of transferring paedophile priests form parish to parish.

As Archbishop Ratzinger, head of the Diocesan Council of Munich, he presided over a meeting on January 15, 1980 that discussed the case of Father Peter Hullermann.

Father Hullermann had forced an 11-year-old to have oral sex and had assaulted three other children. The parents had been persuaded not to press charges and the police had not been informed. Instead he was
supposed to be moved out of the diocese of Essen, to Archbishop Ratzinger’s territory in southern Germany.

Archbishop Ratzinger formally approved the transfer and ordered him to undergo therapy. Again, the police were not informed. Within a fortnight however the chaplain was taking on pastoral duties again. Whether the
Archbishop knew of this is unclear.

Advice from Father Hullermann’s therapist that the priest should not be allowed to work with children, and should be under close supervision, was ignored by the Archbishop’s staff.

Over the next two decades, Father Hullermann persistently re-offended. Only once did it come to court: in 1986 he was given an 18-month suspended prison sentence. By this time, Cardinal Ratzinger was
established in Rome and presumably was not following the details of Father Hullermann’s career.

Informally, on his regular visits to his brother Georg – choirmaster of the Regensburger Domspatzen – he may have heard reports of abuse. Georg Ratzinger himself says that he had “heard stories” about the boarding
school in Etterzhausen that prepared children for the choir. No action was taken.

Through the 1990s, a pattern seems to have established itself in both Cardinal Ratzinger’s Vatican epartment, but also in the dioceses: priests who abused children had sinned, were required to repent and
needed help and solidarity from within the Church.

Open trial and imprisonment would hurt the church as an institution. The option of defrocking an offending priest was also only rarely applied. This week’s revelations about an American priest who molested up to 200
deaf pupils falls into this category: proceedings leading to a canonical trial against the priest were broken off after he applied for leniency to Cardinal Ratzinger in 1996.

But by 2001 enough accounts of priestly abuse worldwide were reaching Rome to justify the drafting of a diocesal letter and the definition of child abuse as a grave offence.

The letter was, on the one hand, an affirmation of existing practice: that is, internal disciplining of errant priests. And on the other hand, a clear centralisation of information in Rome.

The Vatican wanted not only an overview but also control. Yet critics say that no significant action was taken on the accumulated information. It should have been plain, at least from 2001, that Irish paedophile
priests were being moved to US parishes.

That information must have been available to the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith. And to its head, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

Mar

26

Sinead O’Connor: ‘There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope’

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 5 Comments

By Henry Chu – Los Angeles Times

March 24, 2010 | 11:30 a.m.

Reporting from Bray, Ireland – She shot to fame 20 years ago with her shaved head, chiseled cheeks and haunting rendition of the song “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Then she gained notoriety when she tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II on American TV, calling him “the enemy” and urging people to fight child abuse.

Sinead O’Connor is still singing. And she’s still speaking out against abuse — only now her 1992 stunt on “Saturday Night Live” almost seems prescient as the Roman Catholic Church faces a growing catalog of complaints about child sexual and physical assault by priests in her Irish homeland and across Europe.

Such mistreatment was rampant here in Ireland, going back decades. By 1987, the Irish church was alarmed enough that it took out an insurance policy against future lawsuits and claims for compensation stemming from sexual-abuse allegations.

This past weekend, Pope Benedict XVI issued a “pastoral letter” apologizing to the flock in Ireland for the church’s past failures. He did not outline any disciplinary action against the bishops who many here say covered up priestly misdeeds, though on Wednesday he accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee, who had been accused of failing to report suspected pedophile priests to police. The pope also pinned no blame on the Vatican itself for a culture of secrecy that critics say it deliberately fostered.

O’Connor, now 43 and a mother of four, spoke to The Times on Tuesday at her seaside home in Bray, south of Dublin, about the abuse scandal.

Do you feel the pope’s letter was enough?

It’s a study in the fine art of lying and actually betraying your own people. . . . He starts by saying that he’s writing with great concern for the people of Ireland. If he was that concerned, why has it taken him 23 years to write a letter, and why did he or the last pope never get on an airplane and come to meet the victims in any of these countries and apologize?

The letter sells the Irish [church] hierarchy downriver by stating again and again that the Irish hierarchy has somehow acted independently of the Vatican. . . . The documents are there to prove that that’s a lie. . . .

If you were the boss of a company and some of the employees of your company were known to sexually abuse children, you would fire them instantly. You would also go instantly to meet the people who had been abused and profusely apologize and offer your help in any way whatsoever to deal with this. . . . That has never happened.

As a cardinal, the pope wrote an order in 2001 demanding that abuse cases be dealt with in secret. But doesn’t the directive also mention cooperating with civil authorities?

That document stated that all matters of abuse were to be sent to him in Rome, where he would decide whether they would be dealt with by Rome or locally by the bishops. They were to be dealt with exclusively by the church, and they were subject to pontifical secret, which means you can be excommunicated if you breach the secret. . . .

[It's true that] it’s the first time ever that any document coming from the Vatican actually does say to the clergy that they should cooperate with civil authorities. . . . What I object to here is, the first time they said that was 2001. They knew back in 1987 at least that this was an issue. . . . They knew so much that they took out an insurance policy.

So what should the pope do?

There should be a full criminal investigation of the Catholic hierarchy of any country in which this has been an issue. There should be a full criminal investigation of the Vatican.

There should be a full criminal investigation of the pope. The pope should stand down for the fact that he did not act in a Christian fashion to protect children, and for the fact that his organization acted to preserve their business interests decade after decade rather than be concerned about the interests of children, and for showing so much disrespect for Christ, God, the victims, the rest of us, their own clergy. . . .

The Vatican and the pope need to get on their knees and confess the full truth in the same language they make us use in Mass. . . . They need to get on their knees, open everything up, be transparent, tell the truth, ask the people for forgiveness and prayers.

That confession is their only hope of survival into the 21st century. It’s a rickety bridge, but it is a bridge. And personally, I would be willing to bring them across that little bridge into the 21st century and help them. . . .

If they don’t do that, they will not survive. . . . I hope they do survive, because there’s a lot that’s really beautiful about Catholicism. Even though there are those of us who are fighting it like you would fight an abusive parent, you love the parent still and you want it to be healed.

What about the abuse victims?

He [the pope] says his concern is “to bring healing to the victims.” But he’s denying them the one thing which might actually bring them healing, which is a full confession from the Vatican. . . .

You’re talking about some very broken people. . . . Life is very difficult for them. They can’t hold down jobs, can’t hold down relationships. . . . Life is difficult. Therapy costs a lot of money. These people don’t make much money; hardly any of them are actually fit to work. They need the Vatican to cough up some of its billions [to] pay for these people to be able to live their lives.

Should Irish bishops resign, as a few have offered?

Resignation gets them off the hook. They should be criminally prosecuted. . . . If you or I covered up crimes like that, we’d be slap-bang in jail in five minutes, and rightly so. There’s a double standard. . . .

What should the Irish people do?

It’s the good-hearted, sweet Catholic people who go to Mass still despite all of this — they are the people who have the power in their hands to get the Vatican on its knees and confess. . . . How these people can do that is by refusing to go to Mass, boycott them until they actually come to their knees and confess. . . .

The way we are at the moment, we’re in a very dysfunctional relationship with an organization that’s actually abusing us. And we can’t see what’s being done to us. We have the mentality of a battered wife who thinks it’s her fault. If we had a friend in a similar relationship, we would beg him or her to walk away.

Yet you still consider yourself a Catholic?

I’m a Catholic, and I love God. . . . That’s why I object to what these people are doing to the religion that I was born into. . . .

I’m passionately in love and always have been with what I call the Holy Spirit, which I believe the Catholic Church have held hostage and still do hold hostage. I think God needs to be rescued from them. They are not representing Christian values and Christian attitudes. If they were truly Christian, they would’ve confessed ages ago, and we wouldn’t be having to batter the door down and try to get blood from a stone.

Mar

26

IRISH WOMEN SURVIVORS SUPPORT NETWORK IN BRITAIN

Filed Under Personal Stories/Opinions | 6 Comments

From Cllr Sally Mulready
London Irish Centre

Dear Editor

As I sat in my home in East London watching Cardinal Brady tell the Irish nation what was in the Pope’s long awaited letter, I thought of the thousands of Irish people, hurt damaged and defiled who fled Ireland after a childhoods of unbearable and unimaginable brutality at the hands of Catholic priests, nuns and Christians brothers.

I visualised and knew they would be sitting in their homes all over Britain watching as I did, looking for every word that would be recognition of their pain, their suffering and their struggle to live ‘normal’ lives with their families, their children and in their communities. I know many of them would have wept as I was moved to do, unable to articulate whether the Pope’s letter made the hurt and the ever present painful memories seem any less so by his apology .

After a day of reflecting on the Pope’s letter , I find I cannot be satisfied. I know it has not taken away the pain and though the Pope endeavoured in that very sincere and Pontifical Way to express sorrow , remorse and even pity to the Survivors , in the end the protection and the renewal of the Catholic Church and the failure to acknowledge that crimes against children were being covered up, were the paramount messages I discerned from his letter. I am very disappointed and hurt by the inadequacies of the Pontiffs letter. The justice survivors seek cannot be obtained merely through prayer and other ecclesiastical reflections on a so called Higher Authority. Cannon law has shown itself to be corruptible and not always on the side of truth . It will not in itself bring justice.

But I am an optimistic and determined soul. And there are were some hopeful indications that the Pope had begun to understand what had happened and as a result there is a way forward and for that I say thank you to Pope Benedict.

The Popes had strong words of condemnation for his ‘ priests and religious’ who have abused children. He called on them to ‘take responsibility for their sins’ and to ‘submit to give an account of their actions’ and to submit to ‘the demands of justice’. Can we now interpret that to mean that the Pope will not let Cannon law stand in the way of bishops reporting offenders still alive today and obliging them to submit themselves to the law of the land. They have committed criminal acts that should be subject to the due process of his law.

Another hopeful sign of the Popes letter is his address to his Bishops who he accused very forthrightly of being guilty of ‘serious mistakes in responding to allegations of sexual abuse and it had …’undermined their credibility and effectiveness’. Good and decent though some of our existing Bishops are they need to go. We must have a fresh start and their prolonged stay is simply putting off the inevitable. The Pope has I feel given them a way of going with their dignity and their record of service to the Catholic church still intact. Hang on now and they will be forced to go in a matter of months in disgrace.

The Pope’s recommendation that his priests offer up ‘fasting, prayer and reading of scripture’ should be extended to making themselves available to talk and listen to Survivors accounts of their suffering.

They need to know and understand more from the perspective of Survivors what happened. Along with their reading of the Scriptures, I recommend they talk to ordinary survivors in their communities , listen to them with humility and compassion . They should also read reliable and recognised accounts of Survivors as portrayed in Mary Raftery Documentary, States of Fear and in the harrowing account written in the God Squad by Paddy Doyle. With this new knowledge and understanding we can begin to start the essential process of reconciliation and forgiveness.

Sincerely

Cllr Sally Mulready

Chair of Irish Women Survivors Support Network
Published in The Irish Post Newspaper.

Mar

26

To Sinead O’Connor, Pope Benedict’s apology for church sex abuse rings hollow

Filed Under Child Abuse | 1 Comment

by Sinead O’Connor
Sunday, March 28, 2010 – Washington Post.
When I was a child, Ireland was a Catholic theocracy. If a bishop came walking down the street, people would move to make a path for him. If a bishop attended a national sporting event, the team would kneel to kiss his ring. If someone made a mistake, instead of saying, “Nobody’s perfect,” we said, “Ah sure, it could happen to a bishop.”

The expression was more accurate than we knew. This month, Pope Benedict XVI wrote a pastoral letter of apology — of sorts — to Ireland to atone for decades of sexual abuse of minors by priests whom those children were supposed to trust. To many people in my homeland, the pope’s letter is an insult not only to our intelligence, but to our faith and to our country. To understand why, one must realize that we Irish endured a brutal brand of Catholicism that revolved around the humiliation of children.

I experienced this personally. When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioural problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.
An Grianán was a product of the Irish government’s relationship with the Vatican — the church had a “special position” codified in our constitution until 1972. As recently as 2007, 98 percent of Irish schools were run by the Catholic Church. But schools for troubled youth have been rife with barbaric corporal punishments, psychological abuse and sexual abuse. In October 2005, a report sponsored by the Irish government identified more than 100 allegations of sexual abuse by priests in Ferns, a small town 70 miles south of Dublin, between 1962 and 2002. Accused priests weren’t investigated by police; they were deemed to be suffering a “moral” problem. In 2009, a similar report implicated Dublin archbishops in hiding sexual abuse scandals between 1975 and 2004.
Why was such criminal behavior tolerated? The “very prominent role which the Church has played in Irish life is the very reason why abuses by a minority of its members were allowed to go unchecked,” the 2009 report said.
Despite the church’s long entanglement with the Irish government, Pope Benedict’s so-called apology takes no responsibility for the transgressions of Irish priests. His letter states that “the Church in Ireland must first acknowledge before the Lord and before others the serious sins committed against defenceless children.” What about the Vatican’s complicity in those sins?
Benedict’s apology gives the impression that he heard about abuse only recently, and it presents him as a fellow victim: “I can only share in the dismay and the sense of betrayal that so many of you have experienced on learning of these sinful and criminal acts and the way Church authorities in Ireland dealt with them.” But Benedict’s infamous 2001 letter to bishops around the world ordered them to keep sexual abuse allegations secret under threat of excommunication — updating a noxious church policy, expressed in a 1962 document, that both priests accused of sex crimes and their victims “observe the strictest secret” and be “restrained by a perpetual silence.”
Benedict, then known as Joseph Ratzinger, was a mere cardinal when he wrote that letter. Now that he sits in Saint Peter’s chair, are we to believe that his position has changed? And are we to take comfort in last week’s revelations that, in 1996, he declined to defrock a priest who may have molested as many as 200 deaf boys in Wisconsin?
Benedict’s apology states that his concern is “above all, to bring healing to the victims.” Yet he denies them the one thing that might bring them healing — a full confession from the Vatican that it has covered up abuse and is now trying to cover up the cover up. Astonishingly, he invites Catholics “to offer up your fasting, your prayer, your reading of Scripture and your works of mercy in order to obtain the grace of healing and renewal for the Church in Ireland.” Even more astonishing, he suggests that Ireland’s victims can find healing by getting closer to the church — the same church that has demanded oaths of silence from molested children, as occurred in 1975 in the case of Father Brendan Smyth, an Irish priest later jailed for repeated sexual offenses. After we stopped laughing, many of us in Ireland recognized the idea that we needed the church to get closer to Jesus as blasphemy.
To Irish Catholics, Benedict’s implication — Irish sexual abuse is an Irish problem — is both arrogant and blasphemous. The Vatican is acting as though it doesn’t believe in a God who watches. The very people who say they are the keepers of the Holy Spirit are stamping all over everything the Holy Spirit truly is. Benedict criminally misrepresents the God we adore. We all know in our bones that the Holy Spirit is truth. That’s how we can tell that Christ is not with these people who so frequently invoke Him.
Irish Catholics are in a dysfunctional relationship with an abusive organization. The pope must take responsibility for the actions of his subordinates. If Catholic priests are abusing children, it is Rome, not Dublin, that must answer for it with a full confession and a criminal investigation. Until it does, all good Catholics — even little old ladies who go to church every Sunday, not just protest singers like me whom the Vatican can easily ignore — should avoid Mass. In Ireland, it is time we separated our God from our religion, and our faith from its alleged leaders.
Almost 18 years ago, I tore up a picture of Pope John Paul II on an episode of “Saturday Night Live.” Many people did not understand the protest — the next week, the show’s guest host, actor Joe Pesci, commented that, had he been there, “I would have gave her such a smack.” I knew my action would cause trouble, but I wanted to force a conversation where there was a need for one; that is part of being an artist. All I regretted was that people assumed I didn’t believe in God. That’s not the case at all. I’m Catholic by birth and culture and would be the first at the church door if the Vatican offered sincere reconciliation.
As Ireland withstands Rome’s offensive apology while an Irish bishop resigns, I ask Americans to understand why an Irish Catholic woman who survived child abuse would want to rip up the pope’s picture. And whether Irish Catholics, because we daren’t say “we deserve better,” should be treated as though we deserve less.

Sinead O’Connor, a musician and mother of four, lives in Dublin.

Mar

26

Faithful asked to repent for sins of the fathers

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The Irish Times – Thursday, March 25, 2010
PATSY McGARRY

OPINION: Why are churchgoers in Galway being asked to seek forgiveness for crimes they did not commit or cover up?

NEXT SUNDAY is Palm Sunday and Bishop of Galway Martin Drennan has planned a service of reparation in the city’s cathedral at which all will seek forgiveness for clerical child sex abuse.

Twelve years ago, on May 18th, 1998, there was a similar service at St Andrew’s Church on Dublin’s Westland Row. The then archbishop Desmond Connell led that special “service of prayer and healing for those who had suffered abuse in parishes and institutions run by the church”.

St Andrew’s was full. Included were many members of religious congregations. Cardinal Connell spoke of “the pain of those who often cried in vain for help and of those who could not even name their anguish”.

Members of the congregation lit candles from a large “candle of healing” on the altar and were blessed with the Sign of the Cross, “as a gesture of healing”.

Afterwards a rose bed was inaugurated by the cardinal as night descended on Archbishop Ryan Park, Merrion Square. A sign dedicated the rose bed to all those who had been “physically, mentally, emotionally, or sexually abused”.

And all went home happy.

That wonderful little gesture was somewhat spoiled earlier by the unexpected arrival in St Andrew’s of Christine Buckley. She had been the focus of Dear Daughter , a documentary about savage abuse of children in Dublin’s Goldenbridge orphanage, broadcast by RTÉ in 1996.

The abuse was denied by the Sisters of Mercy.

Buckley had not been invited to the service. To make matters worse, when there, she hadn’t the good grace to behave as expected of a former Goldenbridge girl and sing the hymns or light a candle or take part in any of the many, sweet symbolic gestures on offer. Later that evening, talking to this reporter, she wondered why the readings of stories of violence were from the Old Testament when they could have been from Goldenbridge. And she recalled two nuns saying, on seeing her there: “. . . Would you look at that brazen hussey”.

Thanks to the Murphy report we now know that at the time Cardinal Connell had only given gardaí details of allegations of child sex abuse against 17 of the 28 priests the archdiocese knew faced such complaints.

The report also disclosed that he was similarly reserved when dealing with the Vatican. Three years after that service in St Andrew’s, and following Cardinal Ratzinger’s two Latin letters in 2001 advising that all such cases be sent to him and that this be kept secret, Cardinal Connell referred just 19 of the aforementioned 28 Dublin cases to Rome.

That 19 did not include Ivan Payne (who abused Andrew Madden), Bill Carney (featured recently on the BBC Newsnight programme), or two other priests (one laicised) who cannot yet be named for legal reasons. And now we see that Bishop Drennan has invited the people of his diocese to a service of reparation in Galway Cathedral next Sunday.

He wrote to parishes saying “we’ll be asking God’s forgiveness for crimes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that have brought shame on all of us”. He requested that each parish bring a sprig of palm to place on the altar “to express the penitential mood of the day”.

What is not clear is why the people of Galway should feel the need to ask for such forgiveness. They’ve had nothing to do with such crimes or shame.

Nowhere in Ireland had people in the pews anything to do with child sex abuse by priests and/or religious. Unless, that is, they were the parents, siblings, or friends of the abused. Or the abused themselves. But Bishop Drennan was an auxiliary Bishop of Dublin from September 1997 until July 2005. He was part of the ruling cadre of the archdiocese and, even if Cardinal Connell was boss, he and the other auxiliary bishops had an input into decisions.

Bishop Drennan was auxiliary bishop when Fr Noel Reynolds was chaplain at the National Rehabilitation Institute in Dún Laoghaire, where children were being treated up to July 1998. It is a part of the archdiocese for which he had direct responsibility.

He was auxiliary bishop when, in November 1998, the mother of two girls abused by Fr Reynolds – one with a crucifix – complained to the archdiocese. Fr Reynolds admitted the abuse, but no one told the Garda.

That happened seven month later, in June 1999, when the church authorities heard the sisters had already done so.

Bishop Drennan was auxiliary bishop of Dublin in August 1999 when priests of Glendalough parish, in his area of the archdiocese, had a meeting with the priests of other parishes where Fr Reynolds had served.

And he was auxiliary bishop of Dublin in October 1999 when Fr Reynolds was arrested on a charge of raping one of the sisters. The priest admitted abusing both, and 100 children in all.

Bishop Drennan was also an auxiliary bishop in the archdiocese when in 2001 it decided to fight a court action by the sisters, using a cynical legal defence.

It argued it was not Fr Reynolds’s employer and had no supervisory role over him. It claimed Cardinal Connell was not responsible in law for any of the priest’s wrongdoings and that wrongs perpetrated by him were criminal acts and not part of his duties.

Bishop Drennan refused to answer questions about these matters when they were put to him by this newspaper last January.

Instead he plans a service of reparation in Galway Cathedral where the totally innocent will have an opportunity “to ask God’s forgiveness for crimes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse that have brought shame on all of us”. They may also place sprigs of palm on the altar.

Meanwhile, he didn’t even acknowledge a request by Andrew Madden last December that he meet Dublin victims of clerical child sex abuse.

His service of reparation begins at 3pm on Sunday.

Christine Buckley has not been invited.

The Irish Times 25th March 2010

Mar

26

Cardinal’s faith in his fellow bishop proved sorely misplaced

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The Irish Times – Thursday, March 25, 2010
PATSY McGARRY and PADDY AGNEW

ANALYSIS:

Prelate who was secretary to three popes won the support of three archbishops, even in the face of mounting revelations as to how he mishandled allegations of clerical abuse

THE CATHOLIC primate Cardinal Seán Brady must be wondering now at the wisdom of that question he posed at the end of his St Patrick’s Day sermon in Armagh last week.

“The Lord is calling us to a new beginning. None of us knows where that new beginning will lead. Does it allow for wounded healers, those who have made mistakes in their past to have a part in shaping the future?” he asked.

The Vatican’s announcement yesterday that it has accepted the resignation of Bishop John Magee suggests an answer.

This is the same Bishop John Magee on whom Cardinal Brady lavished such support at the height of the Cloyne crisis in January of last year.

The cardinal said then: “I have known John Magee for almost 50 years and I have always found him a reliable and dependable person. I know trust has been damaged, but trust can be restored and built up and even earned by genuine steps being taken to address the issues and the concerns of victims.”

Cardinal Brady was not alone. Similar support also came from two of the three other Catholic archbishops in Ireland: Archbishop Dermot Clifford of Cashel and Archbishop Michael Neary of Tuam. For his part, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin chose silence.

Bishop Magee’s downfall began in September 2007 when a priest of Cloyne diocese complained to One in Four about how his allegation of abuse by another priest in the diocese was handled, particularly by Bishop Magee.

In April 2008 another case emerged through Cori’s Faoiseamh helpline concerning a woman who alleged rape by a Cloyne priest over a five-and-a-half-year period, from when she was 13, and which had been reported to the diocese.

The Catholic Church child protection watchdog the National Board for Safeguarding Children (NBSC), which Bishop Magee helped set up in 2006, then investigated child protection practices in Cloyne and found them to be “inadequate, and in some respects dangerous”.

It also found the diocese had not informed gardaí for eight years after it became aware of the identity of one alleged abuser priest and after six months in the other case.

It further established that there was a policy in Cloyne of supplying minimal information to gardaí and other civil authorities in such cases.

On December 19th, 2008, the NBSC report was published on the Cloyne diocese website.

In January 2009, it also emerged that Bishop Magee had twice “misled” the State on Cloyne child protection policies. He did so in November 2005 and in January 2007 when he assured State agencies that Cloyne fully complied with church and State guidelines.

In neither case was it true.

This is the man in whom his fellow bishops protested such confidence.

On January 7th last year it was announced that the Government had extended the remit of the Murphy commission to Cloyne diocese.

Its report is expected at the end of this year.

On March 7th last year it was announced that Archbishop Dermot Clifford of Cashel had been appointed apostolic administrator of Cloyne diocese with Bishop Magee remaining on to assist the Murphy commission with its inquiries.

It is understood his resignation was submitted to Pope Benedict XVI two weeks ago.

Bishop Magee would have been due to retire in September of next year, when he reached the age of 75.

Contacted yesterday by The Irish Times , senior Vatican spokesman Fr Federico Lombardi suggested the reasons for Bishop Magee’s resignation were “obvious”.

He added: “I would point out too that he has offered his full collaboration to the ongoing government inquiry in his diocese.”

Bishop Magee occupies a remarkable place in Vatican annals in that he was private secretary to three pontiffs – Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II. History, however, is more likely to remember his huge “white lie” in relation to the death of John Paul I in September 1978.

It is now accepted that the dead pope was found by Sr Vincenza, a nun in the papal household. Senior Vatican figures felt, however, that it would be inappropriate to say a nun had been in the pope’s bedroom early in the morning.

So Bishop Magee was called on to say he was the first person to find the dead pope.

However, in an RTÉ radio interview in 1990, he as much as admitted the truth, saying, “I did find the body of His Holiness. I just didn’t find it first.”

Mar

21

Letter is ‘a study in the art of lying’

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Sinead O’Connor says the Vatican must confess to cover-up attempts

By LIAM COLLINS

Sunday March 21 2010

The Pope’s letter is “a study in the art of lying” said singer Sinead O’Connor last night, in response to the Pope’s letter.

“Its even worse than that — it starts lying from the very first sentence when it says that what happened in the Irish church is ‘a matter of great concern for us’.

“If it was a matter of such concern, why has it taken 23 years for this to happen?

“The Pope is selling the Irish bishops down the tubes — it is claiming that what happened in Ireland was the fault of the Irish bishops, not the Vatican. But they were acting on the explicit orders of the Vatican.

“It doesn’t excuse what they did, but they were following orders. The bishops took the very same oath as the victims, swearing themselves to secrecy.

“A few things really offend me. The Pope’s letter claims that the crime of cover-up was enacted purely by the Irish hierarchy without instructions from the Vatican. I don’t accept that — but it seems the Irish bishops are happy to be sold down the river.

“The Irish bishops have more reverence . . . for the Vatican than they had for the God they believe in.

“In my opinion the Vatican should be brought to its knees and forced to confess the cover-up. And to confess its present attempts at covering up the cover-up.

“We don’t need the church at all. In fact they need us. If they don’t confess they’re signing their own death warrant. Because we are far more intelligent than they are giving us credit for. And we know when we are being lied to.”

O’Connor, who has passionately championed the cause of the abused, said that Irish Catholics were being further insulted by the Pope’s call for them to go back to the Catholic Church, which had failed them so abysmally over the past three decades.

- LIAM COLLINS

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