The English translation is
The Hypocrites
The Catholic Church and Sex

Protecting Offenders, Ignoring Victims

A tremor is currently passing through the Catholic Church in Germany. It could be merely the beginning of an earthquake of proportions which have so far only been seen in the American and Irish Church. Tens of thousands of abuse cases were brought to light in both countries. Could Germany be next?

Full Der Spiegel Article online in English

Includes Graphic: Results of the SPIEGEL survey of German dioceses

OTHER CATHOLIC CHURCH ABUSE CASES

* Austria
* Canada
* United States
* Australia
* Philippines
* Ireland

Comments on Der Spiegel article are here.

German translation of The God Squad. click on image to enlarge.

His experience had damaged him but, for a long time, Paddy Doyle resisted writing about it. In the late 1980s, Doyle was a budding scriptwriter who had tackled disability in his early works but had never faced up to the horrors that left him disabled. Institutionalised as a child after the death of his parents in the 1950s, Doyle had suffered such physical and sexual abuse at the hands of nuns that he ended up requiring brain surgery. Confined to a wheelchair, he had been unable to escape the legacy of his childhood, yet he tried to avoid the ghosts of the past.

”Then on day I sat down in front of the computer,” says Doyle. “I looked at it and I said: ‘I want to tell you something’. And I started typing. People said it must have been very cathartic and I always say, ‘You must be joking’. Because what you’re actually doing is rewinding the tape and reliving the whole business again. Especially if it’s autobiographical, you’ve to put yourself back into situations you’d rather not be in. I wondered whether anyone would care about it, so I would leave it only to come back [to it]. And The God Squad came out the other end.”

It may have been a struggle but, by writing about the abuse he suffered, Doyle made his name: The God Squad was a bestseller when it was published in 1988. The book also helped to change the Irish Literary landscape.

What started out as one man’s painful attempt to lay bare hidden crimes is now in danger of becoming a tired trope in Irish writing. Harrowing autobiographical tales have become ubiquitous in the years since The God Squad appeared and child abuse – be it domestic or clerical – has become a hot topic in the literary world. Doyle may have been unable to confront his demons in fictional form, but many Irish novelists have felt no such obstacles. In the process, a once searing subject has become mundane.

Skippy Dies, the new novel by Paul Murray, is the latest and most egregious example of the overexposure of child abuse in recent Irish fiction. Murray’s novel revolves around Daniel “Skippy” Juster, a mousy pupil at a fictional Dublin boarding school, who is buffeted by a futile romance, dysfunctional classmates and, yes, sexual abuse at the hands of a trusted authority figure.

Whereas Murray’s first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was a louche comedy, Skippy Dies aims for something darker, in the form of ambiguous passages about its protagonist’s encounters with a creepy priest and a swimming coach. But given the schoolboy humour and the undergraduate philosophising that make up the rest of the novel, Murray’s exploration of such a sensitive subject looks like a botched effort at artistic significance.

Murray, however, is only following in the footsteps of more accomplished writers, notably Anne Enright, who won the Booker prize in 2007 with The Gathering, her claustrophobic novel of family abuse. William Trevor’s short story Men of Ireland, from his 2007 collection Cheating at Canasta, featured a priest who bristles at allegations of molestation of a former altar boy while paying him off; Patrick McCabe took a homicidal paedophile as a symbol of Ireland’s uneasy relationship with its past in his 2006 novel Winterwood; while Colm Tóibín’s collection of short fiction, Mothers and Sons, has two stories dealing with child abuse.
“Obviously, if you live in Ireland the issue of child abuse emerges strongly,” says Tóibín. “It is hard to leave it out. It comes in from the side for me, or sneaks in, rather than being the theme of anything I have published.”

Others take a more explicit approach. Last week the Abbey Announced a series of plays on child abuse: works include No Escape, a drama by journalist Mary Raftery drawing on the Ryan report, as well as James X by Mannix Flynn. Fiach Mac Conghail, the national theatre’s director, said the strand, entitled “The Darkest Corner, was intended to “investigate” the topic.

It could be argued that in writing about such a difficult subject, authors are living up to their reputation for intuiting the unsayable. Just as Joyce, Synge and O’Casey revealed the ambivalent truths beneath public pieties, so contemporary writers are throwing new light on a troubling issue. But in this case, Irish fiction is not saying anything original. Rather, literary novelists are following a path blazed by a less vaunted genre: the so-called “Misery memoir”.

Since the publication of Doyle’s book, memoirs about Irish childhoods blighted by abuse have become a publishing staple. The early 1990s produced Patrick Galvin’s Song for a Raggy Boy and Patrick Touhers’ Fear of the Collar. At that stage, writers had to tread carefully: a chapter about a Christian Brother who played classical music while he was abusing inmates at Artane industrial school was left out of the first edition of Touher’s book. “We thought there was a chance the Brothers would sue,” says Michael O’Brien of O’Brien Press, which has since published several memoirs.

As the revelations about child sexual abuse increased, within the church but also in areas such as the Irish swimming world, so too did the demand for such books. But while the scale of assaults made the issue a matter of public importance, the quality and quantity of memoirs being published looked suspiciously cynical.

“It’s a legitimate fear,” says O’Brien. “We’ve turned down loads of stories like that, there’s a limit. You have to balance the right of the public to know, you have to be sure they are authentic.” One book in particular, Kathy’s Story by Kathy O’Beirne, discredited the genre; it turned out the author had never been at the Magdalene laundry where she was supposedly abused. “If that happens and it gets an awful lot of publicity, the general public is inclined to go, what’s going on here,” says Doyle.

Accordingly, even those with a vital story to tell have become wary of publishing. As a teen in 1980s County Wexford, Colm O’Gorman was repeatedly raped by Father Sean Fortune. A decade later, with the church failing to act on complaints about Fortune, O’Gorman reported him to the Gardaí (Irish police), leading to the priest’s arrest (he committed suicide in 1999) and the establishment of the Ferns inquiry. But while O’Gorman has been instrumental in the unravelling of the Catholic church’s power in Ireland, he was cagey about jumping on the bandwagon: having first been approached in 20003, he only published his memoir, Beyond Belief, last year.
“I couldn’t see the point in writing it and I didn’t want to tell the story just for the sake of telling the story,” says O’Gorman. “I resisted for nearly five years because I wanted to know what ideas I wanted to explore. I was aware it might be seen – and indeed has been seen – as another misery memoir.”

His book may be one of the genre’s swansongs, Publishers such as O’Brien think the market for “misery lit” has peaked. “Most of what needs to be said has been said,” says O’Brien. “I think there’s no point in just putting them out for entertainment.”

All of which highlights Irish fiction’s continuing attraction – and its feeble response – to the subject of child abuse. Enright’s book, for all its laurels, seemed like a typically parochial Irish family drama with an edgy, topical twist welded on. And Murray’s trivial treatment is best illustrated by the fact that his suspect priest is a French teacher by the name of Father Green, or Pére Vert.

Such a failure of imagination is unsurprising – the topic has defeated more talented writers. Tóibín attempted a novel about child abuse in the late 1990s, only to set it aside.

“The reason I abandoned the novel,” he says, “was that it dealt with abuse too directly and, while that worked in my head, on paper it seemed to exploit rather than explore the problem. There was nothing I could add that a journalist or a judge could not do better.”

Therein lies the problem for Irish Writers. So stark are the abuses laid out in the Murphy and Ryan reports that attempting to intuit a deeper meaning from them seems glib. It is a problem familiar to American novelists, who have struggled to engage with 9/11. Richard ford pointedly set his 2006 book, The Lay of the Land, the year before the attacks, letting it look in our subconscious.

It is an approach that the likes of Murray would do well to heed. Raking over child abuse for the sake of a story devalues the subject, at a time when it has become a more urgent issue than ever. “There’s a point where people are getting weary of it, and yet it’s all very real,” says Doyle. As we digest the enormity of the abuse scandals over the past two decades, the truth is so devastating there will be no room for fiction.

The Sunday Times: Culture Magazine. February 7th 2010

A panel set up by the government to review the finances of Catholic congregations has challenged the spending practices of several of the state’s major religious orders.

The panel, which is headed by Frank Daly, the former chairman of the Revenue Commissioners, has passed its review of the assets of the 18 religious orders to education minister Batt O’Keeffe. He is expected to present it to the cabinet next week.

The panel has issued draft reports to several of the religious orders, instructing them to clarify significant elements of their projected spending in future years.

They include spending on the future care and welfare of ageing members of their congregations, the maintenance of premises and the provision of existing services to the community.

However, well -placed sources said the orders had made a ‘‘robust defence’’ of all their projected spending as part of the review into their assets.

O’Keeffe will also present a separate report to cabinet on the offers made by the orders to a new trust which will be established for the redress of survivors of abuse in Church-run residential institutions.

The total value of the amounts offered to the new trust is expected to exceed €360 million.

About a quarter of the total amount is in cash and the remainder is in property. The largest offerings are from the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers.

A Government spokesman said the 750-page report would be published tomorrow.

Plans to publish it earlier were changed because of yesterday’s public sector strike. There were concerns that helplines would not be available for people who had suffered abuse.

In the High Court on Thursday last the report was cleared for publication, following some edits, by Mr Justice Paul Gilligan after a series of in camera hearings.

Victims’ groups yesterday called for victims to be given copies of the report a day before publication.

Meanwhile, Catholic Bishop of Kilmore Dr Leo O’Reilly has expressed “profound sorrow and regret” to a victim of abuse by a priest of the diocese who was jailed last Monday. Fr Michael Molloy (44), was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of defilement of a boy and one of possession of child pornography. The offences took place at a number of locations including a parochial house in 2006 and 2007.

Bishop O’Reilly said yesterday that he was first made aware of allegations against the priest by gardaí following Fr Molloy’s arrest in September 2007.

“This was the first complaint of any kind received against Fr Molloy during his years of priestly ministry. The gardaí and the HSE have been advised of all previous appointments held by him,” he said.

“I have referred his case to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome and I now intend to initiate a canonical process in relation to Fr Molloy,” he said.

He said that “these past two years have been an extremely difficult and painful time for the victim and for the family of the victim.” He assured them they had been in his “thoughts and prayers”.

PATRICK CLAFFEY

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

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

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

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

Is it entering a land of exile?

The Ryan report was horrendous. The damage done to the victims was incalculable, the effect on the morale and reputation of the church, and, I would suggest, much of the country, devastating.

“How did we come to this?” we ask. It reflected not only on the church but also on the whole of Irish society. This will be followed up by the report on clerical sexual abuse in the archdiocese of Dublin.

In the days following publication of the Ryan report, I was travelling on a train from Dublin to Tralee. Sitting opposite me were two elderly ladies, one going to visit her family, while the other was eventually joined by her sister, a retired religious in civil attire.

The conversation turned almost inevitably to Ryan. The two lay persons, both of whom had sisters who were religious, reacted largely as one might have expected from people of this generation and class.

There was a kind of uncomprehending anger towards the victims of abuse expressed in the most negative terms; a defence of the church, and those representing it; as well as an anger that was diffuse and directed at everybody and nobody, including the church. Above all there was a sense of confusion and loss.

These women, like many people today, struggled with the fact that the ecclesiastical institution, in grave difficulty, often reviled, had let them down.

While we have come to assume that young people have lost faith, this is not, of course, always the case. They continue their search for truth and for God.

A bond of trust has been so severely damaged that it is not clear whether it can ever be restored. While priests often receive generous support, they often sense distrust, even among their own family and friends.

And yet, this is the situation within which the church must carry out its mission. If we speak of contextual theology, a locus theologicus, it is within this context of vulnerability and weakness that we must start today. If we are to speak of evangelisation or re-evangelisation this is the locus where it must happen, for all those who present themselves as witnesses to truth.

Rev Dr Patrick Claffey is a lecturer at the department of mission theology and culture at the Milltown Institute in Dublin

The Irish Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It is for others to do justice to those who suffered abuse in the past and to decide what can be done to ensure that such events do not happen in the future.”

The award was presented to him by Nobel laureate John Hume on Saturday during a day-long session analysing how the abuse was allowed happen and what were its lingering affects.

Other awards were presented to Michael O’Brien (Right to Peace group), Tom Hayes (Alliance Victim Support group) and Dolores Rooney (Irish Survivors of Child Abuse) on behalf of all the victims.

Mary Raftery, the journalist whose documentaries helped expose the horror of institutional abuse, was also honoured.

Meanwhile Augustinian priest Iggy Donovan, in a separate address, suggested the country should have a national day of atonement on September 27, the 30th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s visit. It would be inappropriate for the day to be one of celebration because of all that was happening in institutions at the time of the Papal visit.

“Surely it would make more sense than engaging in a triumphalist nostalgic exercise commemorating what has turned out to be the last sting of a dying wasp.”

The chief executive of the One in Four Group, Maeve Lewis, said everybody in society had to face up to what happened during the period of abuse and it was not good enough to point fingers.

She warned children were still not safe and the State needed to take equal responsibility to protect vulnerable children who are abused in domestic settings.

The Humbert Summer School concluded yesterday.

Irish Examiner Monday, August 24, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Showing moral courage by her attendance, but bringing with her no extra cash demanded by the Government and survivors to top up the meagre redress deal negotiated by former education minister Michael Woods, Sr Marianne O’Connor, secretary general of Cori, the Conference of religious of Ireland, said the Humbert School was “the first public forum to which religious have been invited since the publication of the Ryan”.

There was no prize for the religious orders from the Humbert School. Only two of the local clergy were present. It was noted by many that the Bishop of Killala, John Fleming, away on pilgrimage to Lourdes, had not sent a special delegate to witness both the awards, and there was a series of scathing criticisms of the secrecy deployed by the Catholic hierarchy and their lack of direct engagement with the survivors.

The criticism came from Augustinian priest Fr Iggy O’Donovan and Fr Kevin Hegarty, two courageous priests who want the Irish Church to move out of its closed cloisters into the more participative church of the Second Vatican Council, in which bishops share decision-making with priests and laity in a national synod.

Fr Hegarty, exiled to the remotest parish in north Mayo for publishing articles on clerical child abuse in the mid-1990s, noted how today’s bishops tried “to establish clear blue water between themselves and the religious congregations” in the wake of the Ryan Report.

“As they sought to sail away from the wreckage revealed in the Ryan Report, room on the Episcopal lifeboats was extremely limited,” Fr Hegarty lamented, while Michael Kelly, deputy editor of the traditionally conservative ‘Irish Catholic’ newspaper, bemoaned that following Ryan the Irish Church now stood “in the gutter, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, humiliated, hopefully repentant”.

Fr O’Donovan, who was reprimanded for con-celebrating an Easter Sunday Mass in Drogheda three years ago with an Anglican rector, explained that he belonged to a Church which, as an institution, “rarely if ever admits to having been wrong or to having inflicted harm on people”.

Most strikingly of all, Michael O’Brien accused the Irish bishops of not telling Pope Benedict the full scale of the Irish abuse crisis — and he demanded that the Pope should meet two survivors to listen to their stories.

Rome, Maynooth and Cori needed to take seriously the alarm bells rung in Mayo this weekend, or their Church is moribund as far as the next generation is concerned, he said. However, while Rome, Cori and Maynooth continue to man the breached ramparts of their closed walls, the danger is that like the Church, the Cowen government will shrink from its financial responsibilities to abuse victims.

The unspoken hope of Maynooth and Government Buildings is that the survivors’ group will divide and fight among themselves, and that the media and the public will weary of their plight.

John Cooney, the director of the Humbert School, is Religion Correspondent of the Irish Independent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And, of course, all those in Ireland itself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Vatican was suitably impressed. In 1961, Pope John XXIII said: “Any Christian country will produce a greater or lesser number of priests. But Ireland, that beloved country, is the most fruitful of mothers in this respect.”

BUT CLEARLY THERE was something deeply dysfunctional in that society.

The Ryan report has lifted a lid on what was going on behind the closed doors of the religious-run institutions. The 2005 Ferns report revealed more of its legacy in later decades. The forthcoming Dublin report and, most likely, the Cloyne report will disclose still more from those years.

The problem, however, is not just within “the cloth”. In April 2002 the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre published a report titled Sexual Abuse and Violence in Ireland . It found that 30 per cent of Irish women and 24 per cent of Irish men had been sexually abused as children. In the rest of Europe, corresponding figures are 17 per cent for women and 5 per cent for men. In the US, they are 29 per cent for women and 7 per cent for men.

It is clear that, due to massive repression, Irish male sexuality in particular became, for some, redirected into areas where its expression was least likely to be discovered. For many Irish men, it seems, the combined weight of mother and church ensured that women became a no-no.

Some then turned to children. They were accessible to clergy, particularly. With boys it was even easier. No one suspected anything untoward in seeing a man, especially a cleric, with a boy, not least in single-sex institutions.

As we learn more and more of our past it becomes clear we were a deeply dysfunctional people – particularly our men – at home and abroad. That this dysfunction persisted is all too painfully clear, as the 2002 Royal College of Surgeons research makes clear.

But, equally, it is as clear that our attitudes to sex have relaxed greatly in recent times. An indicator of this is that births outside marriage in Ireland today number one in three. Our population has grown to 4.42 million, immigrants included. It is probable that our younger generation is the most normal, sexually, in Ireland since 1845.

We must hope so.
The Irish Times 24th August 2009

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

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

Troy came to prominence as parish priest of Holy Cross in north Belfast. For three months, he walked with the Ardoyne schoolchildren and their parents past a violent loyalist protest.

Troy wanted to stay in Belfast but was controversially moved to Paris last year. “I’m ashamed by the church’s response to the Ryan report. It has been more about improving the church’s image than tackling fundamental problems,” he said.

“In the 1970s, I was sent around schools to recruit pupils to the priesthood. I couldn’t do that now. Back then, parents were delighted if their sons chose to become priests. Now, most would understandably oppose it and try to talk them out of it.”

Troy said the church couldn’t continue as before because trust had been shattered: “The church must halt recruitment, reform and reorganise, then begin again. Instead, it says ‘this abuse is awful’ but continues its old failed ways. We have a broken, wounded church and those wounds are self-inflicted.”

Troy also questioned the way priests are moved from parishes: “I received a phone call saying I was out of Ardoyne. That was it. The procedure was hardly sensitive or democratic.”

Troy was saddened but not surprised by recent rioting in Ardoyne where there is a rising dissident presence: “The area, like many others, has seen no peace dividend in terms of jobs, housing or education. It has been let down.”

He called for dialogue with dissidents: “Somebody needs to point out the absolute error of their ways to them, but to talk to them with respect.”

August 23, 2009 Sunday Tribune.

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

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

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

Leading campaigner Christine Buckley has been asked to consult with the Survivors of Institutional Abuse to select a representative to receive the award.

The School, which runs from August 20-23, will also host several debates on the subject including “The Catholic Church post Ryan Commission”, with a panel of mainly religious speakers; “The Irish State post-Ryan”; and “How the media ‘outed’ the Abuse Scandals.”