Letters to the Editor. Irish Examiner.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

WITH the publication of the Pope’s letter concerning abuse by religious orders in Ireland imminent, may I ask people who have been so supportive of survivors of abuse in the past once again to show their solidarity with us by engaging in some form of protest in their church as the pontiff’s letter is being read.

For many years, vulnerable children were raped, buggered and punished in a most brutal way. Many remain emotionally and psychologically damaged, fragile people ignored by the hierarchical ladder of the Catholic Church.

Cardinal Ratzinger, prior to his election as Pope, instructed all bishops around the world to treat reports of child sexual abuse with the “utmost secrecy”.

The perpetrators of what Pope Benedict has described as “heinous crimes” were priests, Christian brothers and nuns. The victims were children.

We have a moral obligation to send a clear message of abhorrence to religious orders that we are not prepared to remain silent onlookers while our children are subjected to almost unimaginable acts of depravity. Having spoken to many survivors of abuse, it’s clear the secrecy engaged in by the church on the instigation of the Pope has been a cause of great hurt, pain and emotional abuse. By engaging in a protest a clear message will be sent to the Pope and to other “princes” of the church that their covering up of acts of depravity against children disgust all of us who have the welfare of children as our first priority.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. That is a lesson we have learned all too painfully over many years. To survivors of abuse, of which I am one, apologies have become meaningless. They have had to be wrenched out of the various religious orders right up to Pope Benedict.

Paddy Doyle
City West
Saggart
Co Dublin

Bruce Arnold Irish Independent 20th March 2010

The silence of our politicians is as shameful as Cardinal Brady professes himself to be. They have had nothing whatever to say about their part in the abuse of children and their responsibility for the inadequacies in the law, or for the failure of the law to be implemented. This has happened time and time again, and has been referred to, time and time again, without lifting the pall of silence in which politicians look the other way. We have been lectured by the media on the punishment of abuse and questioned over what to do about the criminal concealment of abuse by senior clerics. Yet, with a few commendable exceptions, both personal and party, the politicians have generally subscribed to that ultimate piece of hypocrisy – Hear no Evil, Speak no Evil, See no Evil.

Not even the extraordinary oppression of the oath imposed by Cardinal Brady on the two children abused by Father Brendan Smyth has brought forth any reasoned and logical response raising questions about the legality, the constitutional propriety, the respect for family in what he did.

To his credit, Fergus Finlay, now head of Barnardo’s but formerly a political adviser, pointed out that this single act by Brady was itself a serious abuse of the children. The same abuse was imposed on tens of thousands of victims in the industrial schools, in other institutions and within the Irish Catholic dioceses. On its own it is a sufficient disgrace to require the Cardinal’s resignation.

He pleaded what so many others have pleaded, that things were different then. They were not. They were the same. The Church was the same. The politicians were the same. And the shameful relationship between the two was the same. Mostly, it was a nod-and-wink relationship, but there was one significant exception occurring at the time when Cardinal Brady was imposing that terrible oath on the two children.

The occasion is worth recalling for its hypocrisy and for the jelly-like substance to which politicians were reduced by the Church-dominated circumstances. The occasion of the Father Brendan Smith investigation, in 1975, coincided with the public outcome of a 1973 Supreme Court judgement. This was the McGee case finding that the State had no right to intervene in marital privacy, including the question of a couple’s right to choose artificial means of contraception.

The practical result of this was to allow the unrestricted importation into the State of contraceptives. The Church was opposed to artificial contraception in any form. The State, in compliance with the Court judgement, brought in legislation allowing for the controlled importation of contraceptives. It was a Government Bill. Fianna Fail voted against it. It would still have passed but the Head of Government, Liam Cosgrave, a devout Catholic, and his Minister for Education, Richard Burke, together with two backbenchers, Oliver Flanagan and Tom Enright, voted against on the Second Stage and the Bill was withdrawn. All four did so believing that this would hold things up and please the Catholic Church. It had the opposite effect, of making legal the unrestricted access by everyone to contraceptives, the Church remaining displeased.

They probably also believed that the ‘Lugs’ Brannigan approach to the law would stop people getting hold of condoms. As an expression of political knuckling under to the Church it beggared belief to see a Taoiseach and a senior Cabinet Minister voting against a Government Bill.

Garret FitzGerald was part of that Government. In his continuing capacity as a commentator on political life he has been uniquely placed ever since to enlighten us about the so-called ‘climate’ of political deference to Canon Law which has been so pernicious a corruption of political will. He is enough of a theologian to be more than capable of doing this. Yet in the only piece he has written on the subject of the Irish Bishops in the last year, he saw fit to refer only to them getting their own house in order and not to the huge and growing problem of State tolerance of criminal corruption within the Church.

Very few other politicians have dealt with this problem. Garret FitzGerald’s former party has seen fit to miss out on this large and complex question in its programme for reform, a programme that has been deservedly and comprehensively rejected by Young Fine Gael. Alan Shatter is arguably the only politician in the Dail who could put together a legislative reform programme and lead it when in power, but this was not included in the largely fatuous Enda Kenny-led reform proposals.

The Labour Party has individual members concerned about these issues. Commendably it put forward a small but important piece of legislation designed to exonerate all those who had been committed by the courts to the industrial schools from the taint of criminality. The Government turned this Bill down; instead of it, Dermot Ahern instituted a system of individual ‘pardons’ to anyone worried by this taint who applied to him. He did not make public this process and few applied for it, a fact that will no doubt be used to contradict those who express concern about this element of guilt and distress with which elderly victims of the industrial school system have had to contend throughout their lives.

Anyone who, without the presence of their parents or guardians or legal witnesses of what they are doing, makes children sign a document saying “I will never directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or of a word, by writing, or in any other way, and under whatever type of pretext, for the most urgent and most serious cause, even for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff” commits a grave abuse of their constitutional rights, the legal proprieties under which a ‘document of threat’ is enacted, and over their juvenile, unformed understandings. For this alone, Sean Brady should resign.

The Pope’s Letter to the Irish Faithful, this weekend, will not remove the fact of Roman Catholic Canon Law remaining part of State laws. And the politicians will continue to look the other way.

Madeline Bunting. The Guardian. 19th March 2010

The suppression of truth at the heart of the abuse scandal will bewilder the Catholic faithful. And it could spell wider tragedy

There is only one conceivable reaction to the fast-spreading crisis in the Catholic church: horror. Only the most virulent anti-papist could ever have quite envisaged the scale of child abuse and the doggedness of the church’s desire to stifle scandal. The rest of us are astonished and appalled. Quite rightly, Angela Merkel saw fit to intervene. After decades – perhaps we should rather be referring to centuries – of obfuscation, the Catholic church has to be called to account for what has happened.

Since abuse allegations first emerged in the early 90s in the UK and Ireland, the denials, both those of officials and those which ordinary Catholics told themselves, have shifted several times. Initially the church authorities declared it was just a few bad apples, but last summer the Ryan report exposed decades of systematic abuse of thousands of children in Ireland. Another line of defence was that it was a particular Anglophone problem with roots in Ireland’s excessively deferential Catholic culture, which had then been exported to the US and Australia.

Now this explanation is falling apart as abuse allegations emerge across Europe in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy. Last summer, scandal erupted in the Hispanophone media when stories in Spain and Mexico alleged that Marcial Maciel, the Mexican founder of a religious order, the Legion of Christ, and much favoured by Pope John Paul II, was found to have fathered several children. After allegations of child abuse, the entire order – with institutions in several Latin American countries – is now under investigation by the Vatican.

Oxford church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch argues that this is as he predicted in his book on the Reformation. Back in 2003 he warned that when allegations of child abuse spread to non-Anglophone countries, the results would be “catastrophic” for the church. Old cultures of deference have succeeded in repressing the truth for longer, but now even they are disintegrating.

Another defence put forward by many loyal Catholics has been that the incidence of child abuse by religious figures has been broadly in line with secular society; but even this argument looks increasingly unsustainable. The current issue of the Catholic weekly, the Tablet, carries a thoughtful article by the head of Berlin’s Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine which acknowledges that the church’s celibacy requirement may have appealed – misleadingly appearing to offer a solution – to paedophiles’ conflicted sexuality. While the debate about disproportion continues, what is increasingly clear is that the church’s determination to preserve its institutional power and authority repeatedly involved suppressing the truth – even when that put children at further risk.

This is utterly bewildering to faithful Catholics raised to revere and trust the institution and its priests. But it is equally disturbing for those vaguely anticlerical Catholics (yes, they exist in surprising numbers) who have tended to regard priests as a necessary embarrassment, an unavoidable irritant whom they did their best to avoid while still finding great inspiration in the faith. The latter position is hard now to sustain; what the crisis starkly exposes is that one of the defining characteristics of Roman Catholicism has been the central role of the priest, and that it is fundamentally flawed for two reasons.

Both are rooted in the medieval theology that when a man becomes a priest, his nature is fundamentally changed – he becomes a different sort of human being. As such, he firstly no longer has the normal human sexual needs; and secondly, he has a particular authority which deserves (and expects) unquestioning respect. Both assumptions are still widely evident in the Catholic church today. Many priests have an extraordinarily inflated view of their position – there are exceptions, but they are rare.

Priests belong to a church hierarchy which owes much to the Roman empire. The pattern of obedience to superior authority ensured that there was no system of the checks and balance essential to prevent abuse of power. Nor has there been much tolerance for challenge and debate; an entire institutional culture has increasingly been dominated by the imperative of self-preservation. The commitment to the prestige and authority of the institution has been paramount – and too often that has been at the cost of individual lives. Modernity has only exacerbated these tendencies; the Catholic church became more centralised around a strengthened papacy in the 19th century – at exactly the same time as European states were becoming more democratic. The result has been an astonishingly successful global institution in some respects, acquiring millions of new adherents over the course of the 20th century in Africa and Asia. But the necessary impetus for reform has been crippled.

“This is nemesis. An organisation consumed by hubris was bound to get its comeuppance,” declares MacCulloch, presenter of the BBC’s recent History of Christianity. “Are we about to see another reformation as the angry faithful reject how they have been conned?”

Perhaps MacCulloch is too hopeful; more likely than another reformation is a less dramatic emptying of the European Catholic churches. The crisis simply accelerates what is already happening: the drift away from a model of religious experience which younger generations find increasingly unintelligible. Despite all the talk in Ireland and elsewhere of inquiries to ascertain the truth and “rebuild confidence in the church”, such initiatives are very unlikely to achieve that outcome. Inquiries prompt more lurid headlines as they expose further the scale and detail of the abuse. They are necessary and important, but they will not save the Catholic church.

The church’s loss of moral authority is only a part of a bigger picture. Financial ruin provoked by compensation claims is another – as the Boston archdiocese well knows. And one of the most acute and pressing consequences of the abuse scandal is that it exacerbates the problem that the church is running out of priests as vocations collapse; a model of religious practice based on the mass will be unsustainable in many parts of Europe within a decade or two.

There will be plenty celebrating the Catholic church’s plight, and it is hard not to agree in some part with MacCulloch, that hubris has played a huge part in this institution’s history and its current crisis. But it is also important to acknowledge that this is more tragedy than anything else. For the victims, their families, their congregations – many of whom see no cause for celebration despite their need for truth – and for those causes on which the church has proved a trenchant champion, stirring lazy consciences on the arms race, global inequality and capitalist excess.

By Breda Heffernan

Thursday March 18 2010

“I will never directly or indirectly, by means of a nod, or of a word, by writing, or in any other way, and under whatever type of pretext, even for the most urgent and most serious cause (even) for the purpose of a greater good, commit anything against this fidelity to the secret, unless a…dispensation has been expressly given to me by the Supreme Pontiff.”

THIS is the oath of secrecy the child victims of paedophile priest Brendan Smyth were told to sign during their meetings with Cardinal Sean Brady 35 years ago.

Crimen Solicitationis, the Latin for ‘Crime of Solicitation’, is a secret 1962 Vatican document which only came to light in recent years. It instructed bishops how to handle allegations of sex abuse against priests in their diocese and set out an oath of secrecy.

All those involved in the 1975 investigation into Smyth, Cardinal Brady — then a 36-year-old priest — the children who had been abused and Smyth himself, were required to sign the oath. To break the vow would lead to excommunication from the Catholic Church. The document was written by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, then prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, previously known as the Inquisition.

It was only to be circulated among bishops and it demanded that all parties to an investigation keep a “perpetual silence”.

Scripted in dense legal language, the document sets out the steps to be taken for investigating crimes of solicitation against priests.

Once the tribunal has reached its conclusion, it lays out a number of different courses. If there is no foundation to the allegations, all documents relating to the accusation must be destroyed.

If it is not possible to determine if a crime has occurred, the documents should be stored in the diocesan archives to be re-opened if another allegation is made in the future.

Morals

Should the tribunal find there are “indications of a crime serious enough but not yet sufficient to institute an accusatorial process”, a check should be kept on the “morals” of the priest.

In the event where it is certain the priest has offended, he is tried under canon law.

Since its unearthing in 2003, opinion has been split on whether the document provides the “smoking gun” to prove there was a conspiracy by the Vatican to cover-up the problem of paedophile priests.

The Irish Bishops’ Conference last week said the document had been consistently misrepresented in the media and that it was never the intention of the oath to prevent victims from reporting crimes to the civil authorities.

One canon lawyer has said an oath of secrecy is not unusual in church investigations and is not specific to sex abuse cases. And although those taking part in the investigation are required to remain silent while it is being carried out, they can report the abuse to police before this.

However Paddy Doyle, author of ‘The God Squad’ and a survivor of institutional abuse, last night described the oath of secrecy as “chilling”.

“My first reaction is absolute disgust, it has to be some sort of criminal offence. In effect, what you are doing is… the bishops and priests are dragging children into becoming criminals by making them collude,” he told the Irish Independent.

- Breda Heffernan

Irish Independent

Perversion of justice if oath stopped report to gardaí
ANALYSIS: Had the complainants or church authorities gone to gardaí (Irish Police) in 1975, Fr Brendan Smyth’s abuse could have been stopped then, writes CAROL COULTER, Legal Affairs Editor

WHEN SEÁN Brady heard allegations in 1975 from two children that they had been abused by Fr Brendan Smyth, it was not the first time Smyth’s activities had been revealed. They had been known to his superiors in the Norbertine order for a number of years prior to then.

Born in Belfast in 1927, Smyth joined the Norbertines in 1945 at the age of 18, and was ordained in 1951. He spent short periods in Scotland, Wales and the US, before returning to Ireland, where he had no formal ministry, but did summer relief work and work in hospitals.

From the beginning of his ministry he organised activities that would bring him into contact with children – for example choirs, catechism classes and altar boy training sessions.

When he was first convicted of child sex abuse in 1994, the then Norbertine abbot, Fr Kevin Smith, who resigned following the controversy, acknowledged that the order had made mistakes in dealing with Smyth. He said his “problem” with children emerged soon after his ordination, and the policy of the order at the time was “frequent reassignment”, which he acknowledged was inadequate.

Fr Smith also revealed that between 1968 and 1993 Smyth was referred repeatedly by his order for treatment in England, Belfast and Dublin. During this time he abused hundreds of children, among them a number of children in Langdon, North Dakota, where he served for a time in the 1980s.

In 1994, Fr Smith admitted that on two occasions Smyth was sent to do parish work in the US, where the bishops were not told of his paedophilia. There he set up “server training sessions” for altar boys.

It was reported that six boys were abused there. One of them subsequently sued. The case was settled without admission of liability for a reported six-figure sum from church insurance funds.

Following the 1975 complaints, the diocese of Kilmore took steps to remove Smyth from ministry as a diocesan priest. However, he continued to minister as a priest of the Norbertine order, and no meaningful restrictions were placed upon him.

Following Smyth’s conviction in 1994, Norbertine priest Fr Bruno Mulvihill told The Irish Times that he had repeatedly tried in the late 1960s to inform senior members of the order about Smyth’s paedophilia, but to no avail. He said that in the late 1960s a “strict decree” was issued in Rome that he was not to leave the abbey premises alone or without permission, but this was ignored.

Smyth did not come to the attention of the police until 1990, when complaints were made to the RUC by a Belfast family.

On May 4th, 1993, the British attorney general wrote to the then Irish attorney general, Harry Whelehan, addressing the letter to him personally and seeking Smyth’s extradition. However, he was not informed of the letter for seven months. By then, Fr Smyth had returned to Northern Ireland voluntarily and handed himself over to the RUC.

On January 21st, 1994, Smyth was convicted in Belfast of a number of offences against children. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment.

More charges followed, and in September 1995 he was convicted on 16 charges relating to offences alleged to have taken place against 13 children in various locations in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1988. He was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment.

In 1997 he was extradited to the Republic to face 74 charges against 20 injured parties between 1969 and 1991. He pleaded guilty in the Circuit Criminal Court on July 25th that year and was sentenced to 12 years’ jail.

Three weeks later, on August 22nd, he died suddenly of a heart attack in jail. He was buried in Kilnacrott Abbey in a pre-dawn ceremony at 4.15am in the presence of a number of Norbertine priests and a handful of local people.

The two children interviewed by the then Fr Brady in 1975 were a boy (10) and a girl (14). The latter subsequently initiated a civil case for damages against Cardinal Brady, the Bishop of Kilmore and the Abbot of the Norbertines.

The case, which began in 1997, was mentioned in the High Court last December when the statement of claim was amended.

Had the complainants who came forward in 1975 or those in authority in the church who heard their complaints brought their allegations to the Garda, it is arguable that Smyth could have been stopped then.

What is particularly serious is whether the complainants were prevented from going to the Garda by the oath of secrecy they took. This would amount to a perversion of the course of justice.

The Irish Times – Tuesday, March 16, 2010

PATSY McGARRY, Religious Affairs Correspondent

CARDINAL BRADY’S colleagues in the bishops’ conference were unaware until last weekend that he had conducted canonical investigations 35 years ago into the abuse of two children by Fr Brendan Smyth.

Nor were they told about the ongoing High Court action being taken personally against the Catholic primate by a woman who was 14 at the time of that investigation.

Sources last night indicated the earliest many of the bishops became aware of any of this was on Saturday last. Despite some discomfort and surprise among bishops at the weekend’s revelations, it is nevertheless expected they will publicly support Cardinal Brady over coming days.

Bishop of Kilmore Leo O’Reilly offered support yesterday in an interview on Northern Sound radio. “I don’t think that it is fair to leave the responsibility at one door and certainly at someone who was essentially a junior official doing what was not much more than a secretarial job, on that basis I don’t think he should resign”, he told the station.

Asked in the US yesterday whether Cardinal Brady should step down, Taoiseach Brian Cowen said that while not au fait with “the particular issues that are arising now” there should be “no ambiguity about the importance of child protection”.

He added: “I think obviously matters that are considered within the church’s authority have to be done so by the church authorities regardless of the fact that it was a very long time ago, 35 years ago.”

The Taoiseach was asked by reporters about criticism of his reaction to the Ryan report and suggestions at the time that he was content to let the church itself sort the matter out.

He was asked: “Would you be able to say now that a collar or the cloth would be no protection for people in relation to prosecution of these crimes when they occurred in future?”

Mr Cowen replied: “That has never been the case as far as I’d be concerned. Everyone is equal before the law but I’m just anxious to ensure that the State discharges its responsibilities. The church has its own issues to deal with as an institution and they should be dealt with in that context.”

Labour Party spokeswoman on social and family affairs Roisín Shortall said the cardinal was “hopelessly compromised by what has emerged over the weekend”.

She said “there should be a Garda investigation to determine whether or not the failure to report Fr Smyth’s crimes to the civil authorities was, itself, a criminal offence.

“I am advised that the administering of an oath requiring these children not to disclose the abuse to anyone else may also have constituted an offence.”

Yesterday Cardinal Brady said he would only resign if asked to do so by the pope. “I really played my part, the part I had 35 years ago as priest- recording secretary, to the best of my ability,” he told BBC Northern Ireland. “We are now judging the behaviour of 35 years ago by the standards we set today and I don’t think that’s fair, it does not apply to other sectors of society.”

He agreed he knew he was dealing with crimes in the canonical inquiry “but I did not feel it was my responsibility to denounce the actions of Brendan Smyth to the police”.

A woman who was serially abused by Fr Brendan Smyth for four years following that canonical inquiry conducted by Cardinal Brady in 1975, said yesterday “the right thing” for the cardinal to do was resign.

The woman, who wished to be identified only as ’Samantha’, told The Irish Times , “I was raped, abused and had pictures taken of my body.” She said two other schoolgirls Fr Smyth abused at the same time had since taken their own lives. “I was 13 when it began in 1974 and it went on for five years. If he [Cardinal Brady] had done something my life would have been so different,” she said.

Maeve Lewis of the One in Four group said Cardinal Brady “has no option but to resign”. Ellen O’Malley-Dunlop, of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre concurred and asked: “We believe we now need inquiries into all dioceses in Ireland on the church’s handling of allegations of child sexual abuse.”

Seán Ó Conaill of the Voice of the Faithful Ireland group said the controversy caused by Cardinal Brady’s action was “a most serious matter and leaves the Irish Catholic Church without a leader in whom survivors especially can have full confidence”.

Victims speak

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

CHILD rape victims have said they could have been saved from a paedophile priest if the head of the Catholic Church had taken action when he learned of the attacks 35 years ago.

Cardinal Seán Brady has again dismissed calls for his resignation and defended his role in a 1975 meeting where two children abused by sex offender Fr Brendan Smyth were asked to take a vow of silence. Following the meeting clergy failed to contact the Garda.

The cardinal said: “I played my part, the part I had 35 years ago, as a priest recording secretary to the best of my ability. We are now judging the behaviour of 35 years ago by the standards we set today and I don’t think that is fair and it’s not applied to other sectors of society.”

The cardinal said he would only step down if the Pope told him to go, but pressure mounted yesterday as victims abused by Smyth during his subsequent 18-year reign of terror said the cardinal had lost moral authority.

Abuse victim Marie Collins has called for the remit of the Murphy Commission to be extended to every diocese in the country. She said Cardinal Brady has lost his credibility.

The Rape Crisis Network Ireland (RCNI) said the cardinal’s position was now untenable.

“Cardinal Brady is personally implicated in collusion with clerical child sexual abuse,” the network’s director Fiona Neary said. “In recent public statements regarding clerical child abuse, he did not make public his role in pressuring and bullying victims to remain silent.

“He did not make public his own failures to disclose a known abuser to civil authorities.”

Ms Neary called on Dr Brady to resign immediately.

“Sexual abuse that could have been prevented was not, and Brendan Smyth continued to abuse children,” she added.

The Irish Examiner

By John Cooney

Monday March 15 2010

CARDINAL Sean Brady did not tell Pope Benedict he is facing imminent legal proceedings over his role in covering up the biggest clerical sex abuse scandal in the State.

Despite two days of intense talks between the pontiff and the Irish Catholic hierarchy in Rome last month, the Irish Independent has learned that Vatican officials were not told about the pending High Court proceedings.

Cardinal Brady is being sued in his personal capacity — as well as in his role as Catholic Primate of All Ireland — by a woman who was raped by notorious paedophile priest Brendan Smyth over five years.

She was forced to swear an oath that she would not discuss meetings she had with clergy, including the then Fr Sean Brady, about her allegations that she was brutally assaulted by Smyth.

This emerged as Cardinal Brady strongly rejected calls for his resignation last night over disclosures he failed to report the complaints to gardai.

Smyth was at the centre of one of the first paedophile priest scandals to rock the Catholic Church and was convicted of molesting about 90 boys and girls here and in the North over a 40-year period.

The controversy surrounding the case sparked the collapse of the Fianna Fail-Labour coalition government under Taoiseach Albert Reynolds when it emerged there were serious delays in Smyth’s extradition to the North in 1994.

Asked if cardinal Brady had spoken with the Pope about the impending proceedings, his spokesman said last night that there were no specifics discussed.

“The discussions with Pope Benedict and nine curial cardinals were of a general nature,” the spokesman added.

Cardinal Brady last night admitted he was at a meeting where children abused by Smyth were forced to take a vow of silence.

The Irish Independent attempted to contact all 23 bishops yesterday, but there was no reply.

The 70-year-old cardinal faced down calls from prominent abuse victims Colm O’Gorman and Andrew Madden, as well as victims’ advocate Maeve Lewis, to step down. They accused Cardinal Brady of reckless endangerment.

Speaking in Co Armagh, a visibly shaken Cardinal Brady defended his role in the 1975 investigation, stating his actions were part of a process that removed the cleric’s licence to hear confessions because he was a danger to children.

“Frankly I don’t believe that this is a resigning matter,” said Cardinal Brady. “I insist again I did act and acted effectively in that inquiry to produce the grounds for removing Fr Smyth from ministry.”

But Smyth was largely shielded from this sanction by the Abbot of Kilnacrott and continued to molest children in Belfast and in American dioceses until he was finally jailed in the mid-1990s and died behind bars.

Just three months ago, the cardinal stated he would resign if he felt his failure to act had allowed children to be abused.

The cardinal said he was not the designated person to report Smyth to authorities back in the 1970s.

Colm O’Gorman, who founded support group One in Four, said the cardinal was deeply personally implicated in the gross failures of the Catholic Church in the management of Smyth and stressed he must resign.

“They carried out an investigation, they interviewed the child victims of this priestly rapist, Sean Brady determined in his own mind that these children were telling the truth and he then simply passed the information up the line and did nothing,” said Mr O’Gorman.

“For another 18 years, as Sean Brady rose through the ranks in the Catholic Church hierarchy, Brendan Smyth continued to rape and abuse children.”

However, it has emerged that 35 years ago Cardinal Brady — then a part-time secretary to the then Bishop of Kilmore, the late Bishop Francis McKiernan — took notes during two meetings with children whom he believed had been abused by Smyth.

The complainants then signed undertakings, on oath, to respect the confidentiality of the information-gathering process.

The cardinal denied he was involved in any kind of cover-up.

“I brought what I heard to the bishop, who proceeded to act,” said a visibly shaken cardinal.

INTERVIEWED

The woman in the case maintains Cardinal Brady was one of three priests who interviewed her as a teenager and failed to ensure it was reported to the civil authorities.

It is understood an affidavit submitted to Dublin’s High Court accuses the country’s most senior cleric of failing to report the formal signed complaints to gardai and of failing to take any adequate steps to ensure Smyth did not continue to perpetrate sexual assaults.

The other clergy named in court papers are Fr Gerard Cusack, as head of the Norbertine Order of which Smyth was a member, and Bishop Leo O’Reilly of Lismore diocese, as head of the diocese.

Neither men were involved directly with the young woman and are not being sued in a personal capacity.

Cardinal Brady is unlikely to face criminal prosecution over the alleged cover-up.

The Irish Times – Monday, March 15, 2010
MARY RAFTERY

OPINION: When clerics are shown to have blatantly breached the principles they preach, they must accept the consequences and resign

THERE IS a phenomenon known as a religious conscience. It is an entirely different animal to the consciences which you and I as ordinary people are expected to have and to heed. Both types tell us – at least in theory – what is right and what is wrong. But the religious conscience marches to a different drum.

Its beat fills the ears of most bishops, priests and brothers, and it drowns out other sounds. It tells them that the most important determinants of what is right and what is wrong are the vows or promises which they made on ordination. Follow these, they are told, and you will inherit the kingdom of God.

All very fine, you might say. Surely no vow or promise could include an instruction to cover up the sexual abuse of a child by anyone? Nor be interpreted to prohibit the reporting of a crime to the police?

But strange as it might seem, it is in fact these vows – or at least one of them – which is a key reason why the Catholic Church has at its highest levels become so entangled in the deceitful web it has made to hide and protect the criminals in its midst.

What lies at the heart of the church’s failures is not, as many people assume, the vow of celibacy – it is, rather, that of obedience.

And obedience is writ large over the latest scandal to hit the church. Cardinal Seán Brady is at pains in his statement yesterday to emphasise that his involvement in the meetings at which victims of serial child rapist Brendan Smyth were asked to swear an oath of secrecy was “at the direction of bishop McKiernan”, his then boss as bishop of Kilmore. Later in the statement, he adds that “as instructed”, he passed all information to the bishop.

The strong implication in this that the cardinal is somehow relieved of his personal duty to act as a responsible citizen, to report a crime and to protect children, is breathtaking to those of us who live by and believe in the rules of the State.

But then, remember that different drum that promises obedience – it beats a tattoo that says obey your superior, subjugate your will to his, do not question or hint at distrust, and above all do not ever place your own views or opinions above his. As the Irish Catholic Conference of Diocesan Vocation Directors tells us: “Obedience is really . . . a willingness to let go of one’s own agenda.”

It is clear from a reading of both the Murphy and Ryan reports that the culture of priests, brothers and nuns “turning a blind eye” to the abuse of children by their fellow religious stemmed directly from the vow of obedience and the emphasis placed on not questioning or challenging a superior – because, after all, how can you unquestioningly obey someone you have challenged? That this concept of obedience has had such a fundamentally corrupting influence on every level of church governance is a reality that priests, nuns and bishops have been slow to realise. But it is now on the point of imploding as a central tenet of a church whose supreme leader, Pope Benedict, has himself become implicated in the cover-up of child sex abuse when he was archbishop of Munich.

As far as Cardinal Brady is concerned, the path he must follow is clear. The Nuremberg “only following orders” defence did not work in 1945, and it should not be permitted to work now. Society has a right to expect that individuals should take responsibility for their own actions. Clerics constantly preach these kinds of messages at us, and are right to do so. It must then follow that when these same clerics – and especially the most senior among them – are shown to have blatantly breached the principles they preach, they must accept the consequences of their actions and resign their positions of responsibility and authority.

This, for the information of Bishop Christopher Jones, is why people become so exercised by the hypocrisy of the church, as opposed to the failings of other institutions.

It was Bishop Jones who whined in such plaintive tones at the bishops’ press conference in Maynooth last week, following their first get-together since their so-called “historic” meeting with the pope.

The other key reason people focus on the church and its appalling record of child abuse and cover-up is, of course, that this organisation retains central power over the running of our education system, through which it maintains contact with the vast majority of children in the country.

Take Bishop Jones, for example. He directly appoints the chair of the boards of management in virtually every school in his diocese of Elphin, which spreads from Athlone northwards across Roscommon and Sligo.

He has a veto over the appointment of each and every other member of the boards. He likewise chooses the interview boards for each teacher in the schools. And, last but not least, he is in charge of the ethos of his schools, which means that he controls the kind of instruction given to the children in what is right and what is wrong.

Given the views of Bishop Jones that we should cease focusing on the church and its failure to protect children against serial rapists like Brendan Smyth, it is entirely reasonable for the parents of children in the Elphin diocese (and elsewhere) to ask whether he is a suitable person to exercise such influence over the lives of thousands of youngsters through his control of the schools in his area.

In the religious world, people can vote with their feet and decide for themselves what, if any, church they wish to be part of, and how and when they wish to worship.

That is no one’s business but their own.

In the secular world, however, it is our clear duty as citizens to question whether a religious organisation whose Irish leader so palpably failed to protect children from a rapist should have any role whatsoever in the governance of our schools. It is a recurrent question. It will arise again and again as each scandal of church cover-up emerges.

The Irish State and Government can allow this poison to ooze out gradually, but relentlessly. Or it can intervene and engage in the now desperately needed process of extending the Murphy Commission inquiry process to each bishop and diocese in the State.

This was shown in Dublin to have been an efficient and cost-effective procedure. It is now beyond time to drag all the skeletons in the hierarchy’s cupboards into the daylight.