Jun

29

Vatican can be sued over abuse — US supreme court

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Judges reject immunity plea in Irish priest case

By John Cooney

AMERICA’s highest court has cleared the way for a lawsuit against Pope Benedict by refusing to entertain Vatican immunity in a case involving an Irish priest.

The Government is studying the landmark decision by the US Supreme Court, which could have major implications for Ireland’s relations with the Vatican in the cover-up of paedophile clerics.

In Washington, the supreme court refused to consider whether the Vatican enjoyed legal immunity over the sexual abuse of minors by priests in the US, thereby allowing a lawsuit filed in 2002 to proceed.

This decision could set a precedent for Irish courts to give the go-ahead to hear claims against priests ordained in Ireland but who served in the US.

Until now, the Government and Irish courts have dismissed clerical child abuse claims on the grounds that the Holy See is an independent state with diplomatic immunity recognised by Ireland.

Previous attempts to make the Papal Nuncio in Dublin appear in the High Court to answer charges of collusion with paedophile cleric Sean Fortune in the scandal-hit diocese of Ferns were declared inadmissible.

This special status of the Vatican caused uproar last year when the Murphy Report into the cover-ups in the archdiocese of Dublin complained bitterly that neither the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nor the Papal Nuncio in Dublin, answered its queries for files.

The Washington decision could also give impetus to a case being taken by Patrick Wall, a senior attorney with Manly & Stewart, Newport Beach, California, who is suing notorious Tipperary-ordained cleric, Fr Oliver O’Grady.

Mr Wall is also suing the Archbishop of Thurles, Dr Dermot Clifford, claiming the archdioceses ordained O’Grady while knowing he was a paedophile.

The lawsuit in Washington yesterday was filed by a plaintiff identified only as ‘John Doe’, claiming he was sexually abused on several occasions in the mid-1960s when he was 15 or 16 by an Irish Catholic priest named Father Andrew Ronan.

Transfer

According to court documents, Fr Ronan molested boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in Ireland and later in Chicago before his transfer to a church in Portland, Oregon, where he allegedly abused the victim who filed the lawsuit. Fr Ronan died in 1992.

The suit claims there was an international conspiracy on the part of church leaders to move Fr Ronan from Ireland after he allegedly sexually abused a boy while he was working at a seminary in Benburb, Co Tyrone, which is Cardinal Sean Brady’s archdiocese of Armagh.

The victim’s Minnesota based lawyer, Michael Finnegan, described the Supreme Court decision as “absolutely huge” and said he was very confident that his firm, Anderson Advocates, would be able to prove the case in court.

- John Cooney

Irish Independent 29th June 2010

Jun

15

State still in denial over Magdalene scandal

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The Irish Times – Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Our capacity for self-delusion has had awful results for those who were locked up, but has also contributed to our economic ruin, writes FINTAN O’TOOLE

THE FIRST time I wrote about the issue of the women who were incarcerated in Magdalene homes was in September 1993. The grounds of the largest such home in the UK or Ireland, High Park in Drumcondra, Dublin, had been sold off to a property developer by the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity. The graveyard was included in the deal – the bodies of the Magdalenes were dug up and re-interred in Glasnevin Cemetery. I noticed that at the same time, the sisters had lost a lot of money speculating on the shares of what was Ireland’s first great bubble company, Guinness Peat Aviation.

What was not so obvious at the time was the deeper connection between these two events. Part of the reason things went so badly wrong in the way the Irish economy unfolded over the next 15 years was the extraordinary capacity for denial in Irish culture. Most societies have a talent for self-delusion but ours operated on a heroic scale. We were able to deny not just things we suspected to be the case but things we knew to be the case, whether it was the widespread corruption in politics or the fact that property simply could not be worth anything like what we were paying for it.

That capacity didn’t come from nowhere. It was formed by many, many decades of practice. With its hatred of the poor (but not of poverty), of the deviant, of the dissenting, of the disturbing, Irish society developed extraordinarily powerful mechanisms for filtering out unwanted people. One of them was emigration. The other was institutionalisation. We locked up vast numbers of people in industrial schools, Magdalene homes and mental hospitals.

The existence of these institutions was not, of course, a secret but knowledge was neutered – in large part by the sense that, since the church was running so many of these institutions, they must be good. When I wrote about High Park in 1993, for example, a no-doubt well-intentioned lady wrote to The Irish Times to share her memories of visiting the home to see her aunt who was a nun there: “My memory is of a group of tough, middle-aged Dublin women having lots of fun at the expense of my aunt, who also enjoyed the ‘craic’. These women were there from choice – they asked to be admitted, it was a ‘women’s refuge’ and protecting them was part of the nuns’ work. Sure, laundry work was hard and still is – but the women were well cared for . . .”

This habit of denial had terrible consequences for those who were locked up, but it also fed into the economic catastrophe that ultimately overtook us. The conviction that what we want to be true must be true and that anyone who doubts it must be deluded, malicious or both, undermined our collective ability to recognise what was happening to us. And if we are to change the culture that has proved to be so toxic, we have to develop a new habit of mind in which we take our own realities seriously.

It is for this reason that the continuing official denial of the State’s responsibility to the survivors of the Magdalene homes is not just a marginal question. If, after all, our Government can’t face up to the obvious injustice of locking up women for life and using them as forced labourers simply because they were judged to present a moral danger to society, how will it ever face up to bigger and more complex issues of responsibility and accountability?

Dealing decently with the relatively small number of Magdalene survivors ought not to be particularly hard. The systems in place for the survivors of industrial schools provide the obvious model, with the added opportunity to avoid the outrageous aspects of the deal that saw the State taking almost the full rap for that scandal. The problem is that the Government is still in almost complete denial.

First we had Batt O’Keeffe, as minister for education last year, claiming that the State “did not refer individuals nor was it complicit in referring individuals to Ireland’s Magdalene laundries” (it did and it was) and referring to the women who were forced to work in the laundries as “employees”. Both of these claims were subsequently withdrawn.

In April, however, Brian Cowen, answering questions from Fianna Fáil TD Michael Kennedy, engaged in further obfuscation. He claimed that “the position of women in such laundries was not analogous with that of children in the residential institutions that were the subject of the Ryan report” and that “the Magdalene laundries were run by a small number of religious congregations”, implying that the State had nothing to do with them.

From the 1930s onwards, the State transferred women from mother-and-baby homes and country homes into Magdalene laundries.

As late as 1970, children as young as 13 were being confined in Magdalene laundries – some of them transferred there from industrial schools. The laundries were unquestionably a part of a system in which the State was enmeshed. Taking responsibility for those realities would be a small step towards decency.

Jun

6

An Independent State Appointed Representative imperative for Abuse Survivors

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Following a meeting of it’s members, ‘Let Our Voices Emerge’ have decided to give their wholehearted support to those Survivors of Institutional abuse who are now calling on the State to appoint an independent spokesperson for them.They state that the present group leaders were not elected by them, and they fear their concerns and opinions re the compensation schemes are not being listened to.

After the Taoiseachs apology in 1999 approximately eight different groups emerged, all getting an inordinate amount of State funding to support survivors. Friction over leaderships and finances ensured then as it does now – that the groups stay separate and many Survivors who have spoken to us state they feel no sense of cohesion in their struggle for help and justice. Many state that there is no democratically elected single leader to represent them, and they fear the compensation from the Religious/ State coffers will not be dealt with effectively. Following the meeting last April with the Taoiseach which descended in to name calling and fighting amongst the various group leaders, they fear the loss of public support should this continue.

‘Voicesemerge’ formed in 2002 and though we are a registered charity we have never received State funding. Our purpose, as ex inmates of the Industrial schools was to support those managers/inmates whom we felt were being accused unjustly for compensation in the Redress Board. Many of our own members- themselves abused, some viciously, were not willing to see an innocent nuns/brothers/inmates brought down in the search for justice.

Back in 2003 we requested that the State appoint an independent representative for all of the Survivors instead of funding so many groups individually. This provoked an outcry from the groups.We also asked that the State audit the individual groups, again (except for Ashlinn), there was outrage.

To achieve justice for so many Survivors a State representative must be appointed.

Florence Horsman Hogan
‘Let Our Voices Emerge’

May

29

HSE orders probe into threats claim at charity

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By Jennifer Hough

Saturday, May 29, 2010

THE HSE has ordered an investigation into alleged abuse and threats made by members of a charity for survivors of institutional abuse.

Catherine Coffey, a founding member of the Kerry branch of Right of Place, has made a complaint to the gardaí and the HSE over alleged threats made to her at the offices of Right of Place.

Ms Coffey is claiming she was verbally abused and threatened on several occasions by a member of the charity.

The HSE subsequently wrote to Ms Coffey stating the matters raised needed to be dealt with “as a matter of urgency”.

The charity has been dogged by difficulties following revelations that the group, unknown to its members, had, received hundreds of thousands or euro from religious orders and bishops.

The organisation has been under scrutiny since late last year after the HSE ordered that its founder Noel Barry answer questions in relation to how it was spending its money. One of the country’s largest survivor groups, it has received millions of euro in Government funding since 2002 and continues to receive money.

Labour TD Sean Sherlock brought the issue to the attention of the Dáil this week.

He requested there be a discussion on Right of Place, and the need to ensure transparency where Exchequer funding applies to such organisations as an “important matter of public interest requiring urgent attention”.

Mr Sherlock called for an examination of the 2009 service agreement between Right of Place and the HSE and queried whether such a service agreement existed prior to that date.

He said questions needed to be asked about the board structures of Right of Place and the publication of its annual reports.

He asked that details of established company accounts, where such accounts exist, be published, and whether it should be necessary for the Garda Síochána (Irish Police) to be called in to investigate the role of the HSE and its relationship with Right of Place.

Speaking in the Dáil on Tuesday, Mr Sherlock said the Government should “shine some light” on the amounts of money allocated to Right of Place, the transparency procedures in relation to the allocation of taxpayers’ money and whether appropriate financial governance systems were in place to stand up to independent scrutiny.

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Saturday, May 29, 2010

May

24

O’Brien got €61k for abuse group

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John Downes, News Investigations Correspondent The Sunday Tribune.

Former mayor of Clonmel Michael O’Brien has received over €61,000 in the past eight years from the state to run his Right to Peace group for survivors of abuse.

O’Brien, who has repeatedly stressed in media interviews that he has not per­sonally sought or received any money for himself, also received some €10,000 from the Rosminian Order over the past decade to help cover the cost of running his group.

The most recent payment of €4,000 was made in February of this year. The registered address which the Department of Education holds for the group is O’Brien’s family home. However, he says he has used most of the money provided to the group to rent offices in Clonmel over the years, with rent payments covered directly by South Tipperary VEC, which administers the money on the department’s behalf.

According to Department of Education figures, Right to Peace has received a total of €61,202 in funding since 2002. This includes a sum of €12,000 paid in 2002, and €6,000 in advance funding for this year.

“Right to Peace has received funding from this department for the provision of an information and referral service since 2002,” he said. “In 2008 funding (of €1,574) for Right to Peace did not include office rental. Since the Ryan report was published the level of enquiries has increased and funding was provided in 2009 for office rental.”

Fr Joe O’Reilly, provincial of the Rosminian Order, which ran St Joseph’s Industrial School in Ferryhouse, said the Rosminians have given O’Brien around €10,000 “to support the establishment and running of his office, Right to Peace, for his services to other survivors.

“All monies were given for the establishment and running of his office for the benefit of survivors. Nothing was given for him personally. No compensation was given to him personally,” he said.

O’Brien confirmed the details of the funding when contacted last week.

May 23, 2010

May

16

Shooting At Shadows

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Sketchy on detail but heavy with suggestion, Diarmuid Martin’s address on sex abuse last week succeeded in undermining his internal critics. But who were the ‘strong forces’ referred to?
News Investigations Correspondent John Downes reports

Archbishop Diarmuid Martin: ‘I am surprised at the manner in which church academics and church publicists can today calmly act as pundits… as if they were totally extraneous to the scandal’
David Quinn: ‘personally annoyed’
Ian Elliot: ‘the archbishop’s knowledge exceeds mine’

Make no mistake, this was a verbal hand grenade launched with impeccable precision. When Archbishop Diarmuid Martin got up to deliver his address to a meeting of the Order of the Knights of Columbanus in Dublin last Monday night, his words were designed to create an impact far beyond the room in which they were delivered.

“There are still strong forces which would prefer that the truth did not emerge,” he said. “I am surprised at the manner in which church academics and church publicists can today calmly act as pundits on the roots of the sexual abuse scandals in the church as if they were totally extraneous to the scandal.”

Speaking of his belief that there were “signs of subconscious denial on the part of many about the extent of the abuse which occurred within the church of Jesus Christ in Ireland and how it was covered up”, he added that there were “worrying signs that despite solid regulations and norms these are not being followed with the rigour required”.

The inquest started immediately.

Who were these strong forces? All manner of names were speculated about, to the annoyance of many. For Iona Institute director and religious commentator David Quinn, the very fact that Martin was so unspecific in his references was a matter of real frustration.

All week, he said, he had been receiving calls from people asking him if he believed that he was one of the “pundit publicists” referred to by Martin. For the record, he does not.

“I’ve been asked a few times was it me, was I one of them. And I’m personally annoyed at that. Because that statement is so vague and nonspecific, it has people chasing off in all directions,” he said.

“He was talking about people who were not extraneous to the scandals, which presumably on the face of it means people who are giving out about how the church handled things, when actually they knew at some level about the scandals in the past. So he’s talking about people who would have worked inside the church… He wasn’t talking about me.”

He believes that Martin’s speech would have been a positive contribution “if there were actually specific strong forces that need to be weakened, and he made it possible for people to follow the trail to those strong forces. But because it is simply not possible to follow the trail anywhere, except everywhere, it becomes unhelpful… And also it actually does a great disservice to people who are doing their damnedest to improve the church’s child protection procedures.”

Conservative religious commentator Senator Ronan Mullen said Martin’s address was a “very significant speech” which deserved a “very wide readership”.

But Mullen, who was a spokesman for the Dublin archdiocese during Cardinal Desmond Connell’s tenure, said he had no evidence of the “strong forces” to which Martin referred.

Similarly to Quinn (and indeed to at least one of Martin’s fellow bishops), he would like Martin to elaborate further on his concerns.

“It would be hugely damaging for the church if there were people in the church who did not want the full truth about sex abuse to come out,” he said.

He has not wondered if he was among the “pundit publicists” Martin spoke about.

“God, no. I became a press officer at a time when the diocese had already taken on and publicly proclaimed its duty of reporting all cases to the police and civil authorities,” he said. “I think Diarmuid knows me well enough… I very much support the work that he is trying to do.”

Catastrophic

During his speech, Martin also made a pointed reference to criticism of his archdiocese’s media strategy following the publication of the Murphy report, noting that some had claimed it was “catastrophic”.

“My answer is that what the Murphy report narrated was catastrophic… You cannot soundbite your way out of a catastrophe,” he said.

Eddie Shaw, a former spokesman for Cardinal Connell who is a director of public relations with Carr communications, used the same phrase – “catastrophic” – when describing the archdiocese’s communications strategy in the wake of the Murphy report during an interview with RTé’s Marian Finucane late last year.

Shaw told the Sunday Tribune it was a “reasonable conclusion” to suggest that Martin was referring to him in this part of the speech.

But he argued strongly that communication should not be confused with public relations, and stood over his criticisms.

“I can understand that there is a difference of opinion on what it is ‘crisis communications’ is about in a situation like this. And I absolutely agree it is not about soundbites. In fact it is the complete opposite,” he said.

“People need to know more than just the Murphy report. So, for example, they need to know that predominantly, this is an issue that is in the past, and has to be dealt with as an issue for the past.

“What I mean by that is if one were to ask and to get an answer to the question how many new abusers within the Dublin diocese have been reported in, say, the last 10 years or the last six years, that would at least give people a sense of understanding that this behaviour and the discovering of it is substantially in the past .

“I want to be very clear about this. I’m not talking about new cases of survivors of abuse coming forward as people who were abused by those who were already known. I’m speaking about new cases of proven abusers.

“[But] that needs to be told in a way that has not been told up to now. And my guess is that the reason it hasn’t been told is there is a fear that it will be seen as seeking to in some way defend or explain.

“But it is not defending and it is not explaining. It is simply providing the lay faithful with a context in which they can come to understand the scale of what happened, when it happened, and if it was covered up and how different things are now.”

Central to Martin’s speech was his implication that abuse is still being covered up by some within the church.

Step forward Ian Elliott, director of the church’s own National Board for Safeguarding Children in the Catholic Church.

If anyone should know about issues of concealment, it is surely Elliott, whose explosive report into the diocese of Cloyne ultimately led to the resignation of its then bishop, John Magee,when it was eventually published in December 2008.

Asked whether he shared Martin’s concerns, and who he thinks Martin was referring to in his allusion to “strong forces”, Elliott said that to answer all of those questions “would involve speculation on my part which I would be reluctant to engage in”.

However, Elliott, who is a Northern Irish Presbyterian, did acknowledge that the “archbishop’s knowledge and understanding of the Catholic church far exceeds mine. I do not know specifically what he was referring to. However, I can say that I am not aware of widespread non-compliance with the standards issued last year. If anyone has a concern about any part of the church not following the agreed standards then let my office know and we will address it.”

Disheartened

At another point in last Monday’s address, Martin spoke of how he felt personally “disheartened and discouraged” about the lack of willingness in the Catholic church to begin “what is going to be a painful path of renewal”.

It was a characteristically frank and open message, from a man who has been subjected to huge criticism from within his own church since the launch of the Murphy report.

In this context, it could be argued that, far from being a misjudgement, Martin’s decision not to name names was a deliberate and calculated move aimed at undermining his many internal critics.

For if you fail to specify who these shadowy forces are, they could be anyone.

May 16, 2010 The Sunday Tribune.

May

16

Archbishop Martin’s too good a man to be a Catholic

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The tragedy is that the Dublin prelate should be the authentic voice of the church, writes Emer O’Kelly

Sunday May 16 2010

I WONDER how many of the men listening to the Archbishop of Dublin Dr Diarmuid Martin last Monday night in the imposing premises of the Knights of Columbanus in Ely Place in Dublin felt that he did not belong there?

Did any of them, I wonder, go further and think that he did not even belong in the Roman Catholic Church that they know and believe in? Because I, for one, do not believe that Dr Martin belongs in a Roman collar; and I do not believe that he belongs in the Roman Catholic Church. He is too good a man for any of them.

And sometimes I wonder if somewhere in the depths of his being, Dr Martin may not wonder the same thing as he struggles singlehandedly for dignity, justice, and wisdom as principles to underpin religious practice and belief.

On Monday night, he called “the future of the church in Ireland . . . one where we truly learn from the arrogance of our past and find anew, a fragility which will allow the mercy and the compassion of Jesus to give us a change of heart”.

Fragility, aka sensitivity and inwardness, linked to stalwart, tolerant witness? I don’t think so. That describes Diarmuid Martin; it is not a description of the hierarchy of the Irish church at large. Nor, unfortunately, of the majority of believing Catholics as they present themselves, whether or not they practise the rites of the church on a regular or irregular basis.

As it happens, I don’t think Jesus was fragile in Dr Martin’s sense, or in any other sense.

Dr Martin was speaking to a group of men who are self-proclaimed conservative Catholics. The Knights of Columbanus were formed as an “antidote” to the Order of Freemasonry in Ireland because the Catholic Church condemned Masonic rites as “satanic”. (The fact that Freemasonry worldwide had a long and stalwart history of free-thinking and solidarity against religious oppression might also have had something to do with it.)

But one thing is certain about the Knights of Columbanus: they do not question the authority and relevance of the institutional church. For them, it is what Dr Martin called a “reality of faith”. The difference is that he also added that as a man of faith himself, the future of the church was not in his hands, but would be guided by the Lord. One suspects that the rest of the Irish hierarchy with very few exceptions see themselves as uniquely qualified to know the mind of the Lord.

In that, they actually have a lot in common with those who see themselves as sceptical of the institutional church, and who react against those who stress the institution, as Dr Martin pointed out, by proclaiming that “we are the church”. Rather, he says, it is a case of both sides feeling “I am the church,” that the church must be modelled on my way of thinking or on my position. But renewal, the archbishop said, is “never our own creation; it will only come through returning to the church, which we have received from the Lord”.

It was one in the eye for a la carte Catholics who sign off with a flourish in the letters pages of the newspapers, dogmatically proclaiming what Jesus would have said and thought were he around now, just as it was for the fervent supporters of the received wisdom and structures laid down by an arrogant hierarchy.

Are the latter the people he was identifying, both lay and clerical, when he spoke of “the sub-conscious denial of the extent of the [child sexual] abuse which occurred within the church of Jesus Christ in Ireland?”

How often have we seen them on television screens, microphones thrust at them as they enter or leave churches for daily Mass, defiantly proclaiming that it was all “a long time ago” or that “it’s time to move on” or “none of this would have happened if it weren’t for the media” while the men in black and red whom they support so fervently drag their heels, and see themselves as the real victims? But despite such “strong forces”, Dr Martin believes, “the truth will make us free”.

He also emphasised, however, that “the moral teaching of the church cannot simply be a blessing for, a toleration of, or an adaptation to the cultural climate of the day”. The rules, in other words, are not for bending if you wish to bear witness to a faith, despite the frequency with which believers “albeit unknowingly to themselves, often view the reality of faith through a secularised lens”.

They are all around us, as he did not point out, but we know them: “I’m a cultural Catholic, but I’ve no time for the institutional church.” They are the people who, according to Dr Martin’s reasoning, would have received a tongue-lashing from the real Jesus rather than the personalised milksop they have manufactured for themselves. The teaching of that strong Jesus, (and this Dr Martin did say) is “both compassionate and demanding”.

The church, he added, is not a collection of individuals who worship when they feel the need; the church is “fundamentally a worshipping community, founded in and nourished by the Eucharist”, just as “Catholic identity is more than about vague ethos: it is about witness”.

And that witness, he said controversially, has been badly served because the Irish Catholic tradition has greatly neglected the place of the scriptures. “Catholics do not know the scriptures.”

What’s more, he added, sounding more and more like an advocate of the beliefs and teaching of the Church of Ireland, “we need a more demanding catechism (the teaching of religion) for those who wish to come forward for admission to the sacraments. Admission to the sacraments is not something which is automatically acquired when one reaches a certain class in school”.

As in the Church of Ireland (again he didn’t say it, but the inference is obvious) where Communion can only be received after one is confirmed, and Confirmation does not happen until halfway through the teen years. Opting for religion for Anglicans is a conscious, semi-adult choice.

I’ve looked for signs of the authentic Roman Catholic voice in this wonderful address, and found none. As a prelate, the voice is one of humility and pain. As a priest, the wish is for the Eucharist to have real meaning for those who presume to receive it rather than a catch-all to ensure the membership numbers stack up, however meaninglessly. As a teacher, the earnest wish is to open the gates of scriptural knowledge rather than keeping them firmly closed in favour of authoritarian interpretation and spiritual immaturity.

It’s revolutionary stuff, and that’s the tragedy: it should be the authentic Catholic voice, but it’s a voice that Rome has always been determined, and continues to be determined, it seems, will not be heard officially.

Sunday Independent

May

12

Survivors Rally in Dublin.

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A Great Day for the Irish, and Catholic Victims Survivors Rally in Dublin for International Action against the Vatican
by Kevin D. Annett

I have a message to the Catholic church today: Get out of my country!”

Kevin Flanagan stood with me and fifty others, including a swarm of all the major media, as he said these words outside the Dail, the Irish parliament, in downtown Dublin today.

Tortured as a child in a Catholic school, Kevin faced the truth unafraid, and shared it with all of us who gathered to confront the state coverup of horrible crimes by the church in institutions across Ireland – and to reveal how these crimes continue.

“My brother Christopher Smith was thrown into a mental institute in Cork by the police for being homeless. They held him there for forty years, and experimented on him with drugs until he died in 2007, a burned out shell of a man. They’re still doing that to people, to little kids, in St. Stephen’s Hospital in Cork, in Unit 5, right now. Where is the justice?”

So said Mary Smith to our crowd, as national televsion and newspaper media recorded the stories and asked me what I as a Canadian was doing there.

I spoke of how such crimes were international, of children who died in Christian Indian residential schools in Canada, of how there, as in Ireland, the churches responsible have gotten away with murder. And I spoke of how most of the crimes led to Rome, and the Vatican.

At one point, Paddy Doyle, a world-renowned author, pulled his wheelchair next to me, as we unfurled the banner that has flown outside the Vatican, in London, and around the world, declaring “All the Children Need a Proper Burial”.

Holding out to me a bundle of children’s shoes that were recently hung at another protest by survivors in Ireland, Paddy asked me to carry these shoes as a remembrance of all the children who suffered and died under church control.

Of all the moments I have shared on this long journey, Paddy’s offering struck home the hardest. Taking the shoes, I said I would bring them with me wherever I went in the world.

Something seemed to join us all at that moment, and I suddenly knew that, in the midst of the official lies, the corruption, and all the unmarked graves, people like Paddy and Mary and Kevin are part of what keeps the soul of humanity alive.

Even the police there today felt it. Watching from the entrance to the Dail, two young Gardai approached us as the rally ended, and extended their hands to me.

“I want to wish you luck, Reverend” said one of them.

But that wasn’t good enough for all of us. Kevin and John and a few of the best stalwarts hurried to the other side of the Dail after the rally, where an “official” meeting between church and government officials was taking place to plan so-called “compensation” to their victims. As the officials entered the side door, Kevin began berating them with Gaelic fury.

“Shame on you!” he yelled.

“Shame on you murderers! We don’t want your blood money! We want you in jail!”

I marveled at the moment, as the church flunkies looked terrified and the policemen smiled, and Kevin allowed himself a rare sense of victory. I marveled at how the same spirit that defied the biggest empire in the world, just blocks away during the 1916 rebellion, lived on in the very hearts and lives targeted for death at a tender age.

Later, over tea and beer, Paddy Doyle announced that he planned to arrest the Pope when he comes to England in mid September. And I fully expect that all five foot two inches of him, a “disabled” man in a wheelchair, will do just that.

Today was more than our sixth “Aboriginal Holocaust Remembrance Day”, celebrated now in the land of my ancestors. Today was our resurrection day.

To all the children, and to those we may have protected today.

………… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ……… ………

Note: Kevin Annett will be continuing his European speaking and organizing tour in eight German cities between April 19 and 26.

May

3

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

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Dear Pope Benedict, Archbishop Mahony and all other members of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church,

Last Wednesday, a Dutch television station broadcast Deliver Us From Evil, my 2006 documentary about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. A few days earlier, the subject of my film, notorious pedophile Oliver O’Grady, was contacted by Dutch police officers, tipped off by his neighbors who had seen an advertisement for the film. Over the course of his 30-year career as a Catholic priest in California, O’Grady abused hundreds of children and is now living on the lam in Europe. O’Grady quickly disguised himself and fled, taking a train from Rotterdam to Schtipol. He managed to catch the last plane out of Amsterdam on Aer Lingus at 20:45. Ironically, had the film aired a few days later, he likely would have been stuck in Holland due to the volcanic eruption the following day.

As you might imagine, after the film aired in Holland, residents of O’Grady’s community in Rotterdam were outraged and contacted me and two of the advocates featured in the film, attorneys John Manly and Jeff Anderson. After I spoke to one Rotterdam family, I discovered to my dismay that O’Grady had been masquerading himself as “Brother Francis” and had been volunteering at their local parish. This is alarming on several levels, especially in light of the Church’s recent commitment to screen all volunteers and laypeople working in the church in order to protect the children and the community. Needless to say, the community was terrified and is still in a state of panic and shock. Another family told me they had been very close friends with O’Grady and had even traveled with him along with their nine-month-old child.

John Manly and I then called the Irish Guarda, an investigatory unit in Ireland who confirmed that O’Grady was on a “watch list,” which means he is a person they know about but is not monitored. They do not follow him or make him register on a regular basis, or take any measures to make sure he is not around children. They do nothing to protect the communities where he lives or visits. Whether or not they reported his history to the police in Rotterdam, or even knew he was living in Holland, is questionable at best. Whatever arrangements were made between the Church and the Guarda are similarly suspect. O’Grady was deported in 2003 from the US after serving several years in prison. Had he been kept here, at least he would have been on a sex offender registry so people would know to avoid him.

So since it seemed like nothing was going to be done, I called my two good friends in Dublin: Noel Donnellon and Daniel Holfeld. They are both respected artists and filmmakers in Ireland. Within two days (after a visiting his old haunts) they provided me with six photos of a bearded Oliver walking freely without a care in the world. He was perusing book stores, cafés, and living the life of Riley. For proof of his whereabouts, please see the photo below.

O'Grady walking free today

O'Grady may have shaved off his beard.

Apr

28

Whistleblower Paddy Doyle – I walked in, I didn’t walk out…

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Justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done!’.

DUBLIN, April 26, 2010 (AFP) –

One of the first whistle blowers in the clerical abuse scandal which has shaken the Catholic Church in Ireland to its foundations can still recall the fear that stalked his wretched childhood. Sent to a Church-run school at the age of four, Paddy Doyle was severely abused. It was not until he was 38 that he was able to open up about the horrors he had suffered.

“For saying anything at all, you would be seriously punished,” he recalls in an AFP interview, when asked why the systematic abuse meted out across the predominantly Catholic country was allowed to continue unchecked for so long. When his mother died of cancer and his father hanged himself in front of him and his two-year-old sister, the Irish justice system in 1955 labelled him as “not being in possession of a proper guardian”. He was sent to the now notorious St Michael’s Industrial School, at Cappoquin, County Waterford, south-east Ireland, where he was viciously assaulted and sexually abused. “They were very serious abusers. We couldn’t even dream of speaking out.You could be deprived of food, of any kind of social interaction with other children.
“So you just went with the way things were. All the children were under the age of 10, so it was very difficult.
“There was a silence,” he said, recalling Ireland at a time when the Catholic Church in Ireland was all-powerful.
“The country was run by religious orders: schools, hospitals and some say even the government.
“The Church called all the shots, decided practically everything. There wasn’t a school that wasn’t run by the Catholic Church.
“In fact, 20 years ago, you couldn’t open a school if no member of the Church was on the board.” Doyle soon developed dystonia, a severe neurological disorder. He was sent to a succession of Church-run hospitals and says he was subjected to”surgery experimentation”.
“I walked in but I came out in a wheelchair,” he said. He never recovered the use of his legs. When he finally felt able to reveal what had happened to him, he was worried how others would react.
He recalled: “I sat in front of my computer and told (it): ‘I want to tell you something’. It didn’t answer me back.” Eventually he poured all the pain of his ordeal into a book, “The God Squad”. The first publisher he approached “said it was a brilliant book but too risky to be published”, but an independent publishing house took it on (Raven Arts Press)and the book went on sale in 1989.

The initial reaction was underwhelming. “It fell on deaf ears. The Irish psyche didn’t want to believe (it),” Doyle said. The disbelief was perhaps even greater because Doyle recounted in the book that he had been abused not by men, but by the nuns who ran the school.
“An awful lot of people couldn’t get their head around the idea of a woman who could become an abuser,” he said. “The God Squad” became a success and showed the way forward for other victims to overcome their fear.

Subsequent government investigations have revealed substantial levels of abuse in many Catholic-run institutions from the 1950s to the 1970s and the Church’s complicity in covering it up. Even the current head of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady, has faced calls to resign after it emerged that he had required two abused children to sign an oath of silence. Doyle says that despite the progress, and financial compensation for victims, he is still appalled that the “denial” of his country’s dark years continues. “There is no abuser in jail. Why aren’t they in prison?” he asks,dismissing Pope Benedict XVI’s recent apologies for the handling of the abuse scandal as “farcical”.

“From the Pope right down, they should be before the court.”

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Child abuse in the Catholic Church: why Ireland kept quiet
DUBLIN, April 26, 2010 (AFP) – The extent of the unimaginable sexual and physical abuse suffered by thousands of children in Catholic-run institutions in Ireland is becoming clear, but why did it remain secret for so long? Academics and victims say that the Church itself as well as police,teachers and even victims’ families all helped maintain the veil of secrecy. This was because of the huge authority wielded by the Church in Ireland which meant that some parents actually blamed children for bringing abuse on themselves. Until the early 1990s, “it was simply impossible to challenge the Church”, said Kevin Lalor, head of the School of Social Sciences and Law at the Dublin Institute of Technology. To understand the Catholic Church’s central role in society, you have to recognise its role as an “anti-British force” prior to Irish independence in1921, Lalor said. “As the centre of identity, it had an overly inflated status. More so than in any other country, the Church was an official arm of the state,” he added. The majority of schools and hospitals were managed by the Catholic Church, and it even influenced the composition of governments.
“The Church was extremely dominant. People were living through the Church,” said Dr Helen Buckley, senior lecturer in child protection at Trinity College Dublin. It set the moral code and victims of abuse committed by priests or nuns who dared to speak up faced formidable obstacles. “The priest was the ultimate symbol of morality and chastity and was highly respected. The victim might not have been believed by the community,friends and even relatives,” said Sue Donnelly, a sociologist at University College Dublin. A significant breakthrough came in 1990, when a local newspaper dared to print accusations of abuse against a priest in Ferns diocese in south-eastern of the country.
“People reacted in complete disbelief. They gathered in front of the offices of the newspaper, burned some issues and boycotted the businesses that advertised in it,” Donnelly recalled. But the story sparked a huge investigation which eventually led to the government-backed Ferns report of 2005. It detailed serious abuse and the failure of senior churchmen to identify and remove paedophile priests. A fundamental lack of understanding about sexual abuse also helped to keep the lid on what was happening in orphanages and state-run reform schools. “There was a lack of awareness about sexual abuse. Up to 15 or 20 year ago, people thought it was committed by very strange people, living in remote areas, who had mental difficulties or drink problems,” Buckley says. Ignorance of sexual abuse and the belief that the Church could do no wrong meant some parents would even say “you must have deserved it if a child would come and say he was punished by his teacher,” according to Lalor. The police were reluctant to rock the boat. “They felt a quiet word to the bishop was the best option, that it was a moral issue, not a legal one,”Lalor added. Reports into institutional abuse have repeatedly found that priests found to be abusing children were quietly moved to another parish, where they often started abusing again. Donnelly stressed that victims also faced the difficulty of talking about sexuality in the extremely conservative Ireland of the 1960s and 1970s, and those who “told tales” faced being accused of not being “a good Catholic”.

Paddy Doyle, one of the first victims to lift the lid on the scandal with his 1990 book “The God Squad”, says that small children also lived in fear of being “punished even stronger” if they tried to denounce their abusers. “For saying anything at all, you would be seriously punished, beaten, you could be deprived of food, of any kind of social interaction with other children,” he recalls of his childhood in a Catholic-run institution where he was sent as an orphan aged four in 1955. Then, in the 1990s, people gradually started to talk about their experiences, encouraged by various counselling services set up around that time.

Lalor said that “all of a sudden, we went from a total absence of the subject” to the start of the chain of events that led to the resignations of a succession of Irish bishops for failing to stamp out abuse. The latest to stand down, on Thursday, was James Moriarty, bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, who recognised that the “long struggle of survivors” had revealed an “un-Christian” culture within the Church.

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