This link sent to me Aislinn Education and Support Centre is brought to your attention as it outlines what the Aislinn Centre does. Note that despite generous funding Aislinn has ‘insufficient funding for a website’ At the bottom of the page you’ll see a series of clickable links some of which show that Aislinn is making major preparations for the Eucharistic Congress. I’m baffled as to what this has to do with people who have been abused just as I’m baffled as to what is to be achieved by people doing an ‘Inca Trek’.

Perhaps some of the contributors to this website might enlighten me as to what action if any should be taken against an organisation whose funding exceeds one million Euro to date.

Check out ‘Opportunities’ ‘Events’ etc at the very bottom of the page.

Letters to the Editor Irish Times 31 March 2011

Madam,

The Irish Catholic Church has lately intimated through Archbishop Diarmuid Martin that it would no longer insist on continuing to govern the very large number of public primary schools which it owns and controls, and has done since the foundation of the State (Home News, February 23rd). This volte-face is to be welcomed, seeing that the majority of the population no longer feels its children should be force-fed any one particular religious ethos or creed.

The State will therefore assume the ownership of these many schools, and will as a consequence be compelled to purchase them from their clerical owners. In view of the tardy and inadequate manner in which the institutional Catholic Church has so far behaved regarding the recompense and treatment of the huge numbers who have suffered abuse and pain at the hands of its ministers and clergy, would it not now be just and proper that these school buildings and appurtenances should be donated free and unentailed to the State? After all, the Irish State has always paid for the maintenance and salaries of these schools and their teachers over the years, and the cost of such a purchase, despite the recent fall in real estate worth, would amount to yet another serious financial burden on this already deeply indebted country.

Such a gesture on the part of the Irish Catholic Church would go some way towards making up for the terrible deeds, so long covered up, of its clergy. Handwringing and the public washing of feet may be symbolic, but are singularly inadequate in such circumstances, and the institutional church has a long road to travel towards its hoped-for rehabilitation. This could be seen as a welcome step in this journey. – Yours, etc,

DAVID GRANT,

Waterford.

The following letter appeared in today version of the Irish Times. The longer version of the letter is included below:

Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Madam,

Are the candidates running for office ignoring the Ferns, Ryan, and Murphy Reports and their collective indictment of this nation’s treatment of its children? It is a serious question, asked in light of the scant attention afforded the issue of church-State relations over the course of the campaign.
And, even as the economic agenda dominates the political debate, we ask whether the incoming government will complete the unfinished work of making right the abuses suffered by women and children in residential and other institutions? Simply put, does the financial crisis veto all other social and political concerns for the foreseeable future?
Before heading to the polls on Friday, we think it important to remind the electorate of the June 2009 all-party Dáil motion pledging to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”. Were we not meant to understand by that motion that the neglect of vulnerable and/or socially marginalised children was a thing of the past? The Murphy report was published in November 2009, and one year later its full import was realised with the publication of excised material detailing the heinous abuses perpetrated by Fr Tony Walsh.
The Cloyne Diocese report will be published later this spring, in the first months of the new government. Will our political leaders have the courage finally to hold the Catholic Church accountable for past abuses, and in doing so prioritise the rights of survivors?
In November 2010, the Irish Human Rights Commission found sufficient evidence of significant human rights violations in the nation’s Magdalene laundries to recommend that the Government institute a statutory inquiry.
The outgoing Government refused to act, referring the assessment document to the Attorney General’s office for review. No action was taken. Again, our political leaders failed the most vulnerable of our citizens. In the final days of this campaign, we ask for whom does the political system work in this country?
Whoever is elected to office on Friday, our political leaders must demonstrate the political will to address the unfinished business of our nation’s past – the business of church-State collusion and complicity in the abuse of tens of thousands of our citizens. – Yours, etc,

JAMES M SMITH, Associate Professor, English Department, Boston College
Mari Steed, Director, Justice for Magdalenes;
CLAIRE McGETTRICK, Adoption Rights Alliance;
PADDY DOYLE, Author, The God Squad,
MAEVE O’ROURKE, Harvard University Law School Global Human Rights Fellow,
C/o Justice for Magdalenes,
Crocknahattina,
Bailieborough,
Co Cavan.
=================================================================
LONG VERSION – Unedited by the Irish Times.

Church abuse should be a serious election concern

With the general election now only days away, we ask whether the candidates running for office are ignoring the Ferns, Ryan, and Murphy Reports and their collective indictment of this nation’s treatment of its children? It is a serious question, asked in light of the scant attention afforded the issue of Church-State relations over the course of the campaign.

And, even as the economic agenda dominates the political debate, we ask whether the incoming government will complete the unfinished work of making right the abuses suffered by women and children in residential and other institutions? Simply put, does the financial crisis veto all other social and political concerns for the foreseeable future?

If you were expecting to find answers to these questions in the party manifestos, you would be wrong. Reading the various programs for government, it is impossible to determine where the political leaders stand on these issues. Social and child welfare is either ignored altogether or appears peripheral to the various plans. The implications for survivors of institutional abuse are deeply troubling.

So, before heading to the polls on Friday, we think it important to remind the electorate of the June 2009 all-party Dáil motion pledging to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”? Were we not meant to understand by that motion that the neglect of vulnerable and/or socially marginalized children was a thing of the past?

Some of us were sceptical at the time. Within months of the Ryan Report, the outgoing Minister for Children characterized the 2009 Institutional Child Abuse Bill as “premature.” That legislation would have extended the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme to groups previously excluded. It would have removed the “gagging order” from survivors who received a settlement through the RIRB. And, it would have wiped clean all criminal records for adults detained as children in residential institutions. Survivors still wait for their political leaders to deliver these reforms.

The Murphy report was published in November 2009, and one year later its full import was realized with the publication of excised material detailing the heinous abuses perpetrated by Fr. Tony Walsh. We seem to have forgotten Brian Cowen’s defence of the Papal Nuncio’s non-cooperation with the commission of inquiry on terms of diplomatic protocols? We didn’t know then, of course, that the Papal Nuncio instructed Irish Bishops in a 1997 letter that the Vatican had “serious reservations” about a plan for mandatory reporting of clerical sex-abuse cases to the police. The Cloyne Diocese report will be published later this spring, in the first months of the new government. Will our political leaders have the courage finally to hold the Catholic Church accountable for past abuses, and in doing so prioritize the rights of survivors?

Irish society has witnessed the HSE compelled to produce figures for the numbers of children who died in its care over the past ten years—estimated at 200. Likewise, we learned of the 219 infants who died while resident in the Bethany Home, dispatched to an unmarked grave at Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. Dare we ask that politicians investigate the nature of the state’s involvement in these deaths? And, what of the infants who died in Catholic mother-and-baby homes like Bessboro, Sean Ross Abbey or Castlepollard? Where are those infants buried?

In November 2010, the Irish Human Rights Commission found sufficient evidence of significant human rights violations in the nation’s Magdalene laundries to recommend that the government institute a statutory inquiry. The IHRC Assessment report recognizes the importance of restorative justice for a population of aging and elderly survivors. The outgoing government refused to act, referring the document to the Attorney General’s office for review. No action was taken. Again, our political leaders failed the most vulnerable of our citizens.

It doesn’t stop there. Irish society is still waiting for a constitutional referendum on children’s rights. We are still waiting for adoption legislation that recognizes the right of adoptees to access their birth records. And, we are still waiting for emergency social work coverage for vulnerable children during weekends and holiday periods. Children left un-protected. Will our newly elected government ensure their health and safety?

In the final days of this campaign, we ask for whom does the political system work in this country?

Not for our most vulnerable citizens? Not for those seeking to reclaim their stolen past? Not for those seeking justice for abuses perpetrated on them at the hands of Catholic religious orders and the State. Not for those children of parents victimized by a culture of political deference to the
Catholic Church? Not for adult adoptees seeking to know who they are and where they come from? Not for a population of elderly and aging women desperate to know that what happened to them in a different era was wrong and that they were not at fault?

Whoever is elected to office next Friday, our political leaders must demonstrate the political will to address the unfinished business of our nation’s past—the business of Church-State collusion and complicity in the abuse of tens of thousands of our citizens.

James M. Smith, Associate Professor, English Department, Boston College
Mari Steed, Director, Justice for Magdalenes
Claire McGettrick, Adoption Rights Alliance
Paddy Doyle, Author: The God Squad, Moderator, http://www.paddydoyle.com
Maeve O’Rourke, Harvard University Law School Global Human Rights Fellow

With the general election now only days away, we ask whether the candidates running for office are ignoring the Ferns, Ryan, and Murphy Reports and their collective indictment of this nation’s treatment of its children? It is a serious question, asked in light of the scant attention afforded the issue of Church-State relations over the course of the campaign.

And, even as the economic agenda dominates the political debate, we ask whether the incoming government will complete the unfinished work of making right the abuses suffered by women and children in residential and other institutions? Simply put, does the financial crisis veto all other social and political concerns for the foreseeable future?

If you were expecting to find answers to these questions in the party manifestos, you would be wrong. Reading the various programs for government, it is impossible to determine where the political leaders stand on these issues. Social and child welfare is either ignored altogether or appears peripheral to the various plans. The implications for survivors of institutional abuse are deeply troubling.

So, before heading to the polls on Friday, we think it important to remind the electorate of the June 2009 all-party Dáil motion pledging to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”? Were we not meant to understand by that motion that the neglect of vulnerable and/or socially marginalized children was a thing of the past?

Some of us were sceptical at the time. Within months of the Ryan Report, the outgoing Minister for Children characterized the 2009 Institutional Child Abuse Bill as “premature.” That legislation would have extended the Residential Institutions Redress Scheme to groups previously excluded. It would have removed the “gagging order” from survivors who received a settlement through the RIRB. And, it would have wiped clean all criminal records for adults detained as children in residential institutions. Survivors still wait for their political leaders to deliver these reforms.

The Murphy report was published in November 2009, and one year later its full import was realized with the publication of excised material detailing the heinous abuses perpetrated by Fr. Tony Walsh. We seem to have forgotten Brian Cowen’s defence of the Papal Nuncio’s non-cooperation with the commission of inquiry on terms of diplomatic protocols? We didn’t know then, of course, that the Papal Nuncio instructed Irish Bishops in a 1997 letter that the Vatican had “serious reservations” about a plan for mandatory reporting of clerical sex-abuse cases to the police. The Cloyne Diocese report will be published later this spring, in the first months of the new government. Will our political leaders have the courage finally to hold the Catholic Church accountable for past abuses, and in doing so prioritize the rights of survivors?

Irish society has witnessed the HSE compelled to produce figures for the numbers of children who died in its care over the past ten years—estimated at 200. Likewise, we learned of the 219 infants who died while resident in the Bethany Home, dispatched to an unmarked grave at Dublin’s Mount Jerome Cemetery. Dare we ask that politicians investigate the nature of the state’s involvement in these deaths? And, what of the infants who died in Catholic mother-and-baby homes like Bessboro, Sean Ross Abbey or Castlepollard? Where are those infants buried?

In November 2010, the Irish Human Rights Commission found sufficient evidence of significant human rights violations in the nation’s Magdalene laundries to recommend that the government institute a statutory inquiry. The IHRC Assessment report recognizes the importance of restorative justice for a population of aging and elderly survivors. The outgoing government refused to act, referring the document to the Attorney General’s office for review. No action was taken. Again, our political leaders failed the most vulnerable of our citizens.

It doesn’t stop there. Irish society is still waiting for a constitutional referendum on children’s rights. We are still waiting for adoption legislation that recognizes the right of adoptees to access their birth records. And, we are still waiting for emergency social work coverage for vulnerable children during weekends and holiday periods. Children left un-protected. Will our newly elected government ensure their health and safety?

In the final days of this campaign, we ask for whom does the political system work in this country?

Not for our most vulnerable citizens? Not for those seeking to reclaim their stolen past? Not for those seeking justice for abuses perpetrated on them at the hands of Catholic religious orders and the State. Not for those children of parents victimized by a culture of political deference to the
Catholic Church? Not for adult adoptees seeking to know who they are and where they come from? Not for a population of elderly and ageing women desperate to know that what happened to them in a different era was wrong and that they were not at fault?

Whoever is elected to office next Friday, our political leaders must demonstrate the political will to address the unfinished business of our nation’s past—the business of Church-State collusion and complicity in the abuse of tens of thousands of our citizens.

James M. Smith, Associate Professor, English Department, Boston College
Mari Steed, Director, Justice for Magdalenes
Claire McGettrick, Adoption Rights Alliance
Paddy Doyle, Author: The God Squad, Moderator,Paddy’s Website
Maeve O’Rourke, Harvard University Law School Global Human Rights Fellow

Thursday, December 23, 2010

ERIC CONWAY’S letter of December 17th asserts that an ill defined group he termed the “liberal/feminist commentariat” were, amongst other things, “quite sanguine/blase over Bethany House”.

I have been involved in researching inadequacies in the treatment of women and children in the Bethany Home, and in helping former residents to campaign for redress. In connection with this campaign, residents have been supported by the following TDs and senators: Ivana Bacik, Joe Costello, Tom Kitt, Paul Keogh, Michael Kennedy, Kathleen Lynch, David Norris, Caoimhin Ó Caolain, Fergus O’Dowd, Aongus Ó Snodaigh, Tom Kitt and Michael Kennedy. When details were released of 40 graves of Bethany children in Mount Jerome cemetery Dublin in May and a total of 219 in September, the issue was comprehensively covered in the media.

Are the public representatives, journalists and newspapers responsible in Mr Conway’s “liberal/feminist” rogues gallery? If so he might reconsider the point, not least as I believe they also made statements about, or covered, the deaths of children in state care. Mr Conway’s letter suggested they did not.

Mr Conway’s point in relation to 200 children who died in state care can be extended to the abandonment of the state’s duty of care in the past to women and children in institutions run with a religious ethos, such as the Bethany Home. We have moved from stigmatising certain groups, such as unmarried mothers and their “illegitimate” children, to general indifference toward the marginalised poor. This links the eras of religious and secular unconcern toward the vulnerable. In both eras the state had/has a responsibility, a responsibility in relation to the Bethany children that has yet to be officially acknowledged through some form of redress. Though one institution was Protestant the other Roman Catholic, the state appears equally indifferent to the well being of both groups of residents.

Niall Meehan
Faculty Head Journalism & Media
Griffith College
Dublin

This story appeared in the printed version of the Irish Examiner Thursday, December 23, 2010

The e-mail below has been edited very slightly. The original has been sent to the Department of Education with the writer’s name. To protect their identity, I’ve been asked not to publish their name on this website and I’m happy to do that given the gravity of its content. Paddy Doyle

Dear (Name is given)

I have been in touch with you before regarding the SF. (Statutory Fund)
During my conversation I recall complaining about the group “Right of Place” in Cork and their lack of a Mandate.
I received a telephone call from an old woman here in the USA last night. She had just received a letter from “Right of Place”.
I had written to Christopher Heapy a few years ago telling him to REMOVE this woman from their database.

She NEVER signed up to be a member of this group

They still have her on their database, her home address and God knows what other information.

She initially went to a meeting in Boston years ago when Noel C Barry came to the USA to advise people the Redress Board.
The lady to whom I’m referring never signed any paper work to that could link her to “Right of Place” at this meeting.

What she did do was to sign up with a Dublin solicitor who was travelling with Noel C Barry. She filled out her forms for the Redress Board with the Solicitor.

I am seriously concerned as to who gave Noel C. Barry of “Right of Place” this woman’s private and confidential information

Was it the firm of Solicitors?

I also suspect that other people on this side of “the pond” were signed up as members of “Right of Place” WITHOUT THEIR CONSENT having been given.

Right of Place has been funded to the tune of millions from your department. None of these millions have made their way to any former ‘survivors’ that I’m aware of.

Today the Irish are on their knees, broken and ashamed. The whole world is looking on. I know, I’m Irish and I’m in the in the USA. What’s happening in Ireland right now is a source of great embarrassment and shame to me.

The leaders of – “Right of Place”, “Right of Peace” and all the other so called ‘survivor representative leaders’ should now step down. Department of Education must now insist that ‘survivors’ be allowed to decide who they want to speak on their behalf. Furthermore, all funding to these groups who have no mandate must cease immediately.

The GAME IS OVER
‘WAS IT FOR THIS?”

Enough is Enough

KAREN COLEMAN

THE BIG PICTURE : A blind support of the church and a craven deference to bankers are two symptoms of the same malaise

IN 1962 Gerry Carey’s father stumbled home after a night of boozing and ordered his family to pack their bags and to leave their house in Co Offaly. He told them he had lost the bungalow in a gambling session earlier that night. Their new home, he mumbled in a drunken haze, was parked outside in the yard. It was a camper van that was more suited to weekend jaunts than a family home for six.

Four-year old Gerry and his bewildered mother and brothers climbed into the camper van and drove a few miles up the road where they parked by a sandpit. For the next two years the Careys eked out an existence depending on handouts from neighbours while their father drank his wages in the local pubs. Neighbours, who employed him as a turf cutter, plied him with booze and spuds in lieu of cash.

Life was miserable in the damp, cold caravan and things gradually worsened for the Careys, until one day in 1964 a man from the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children arrived in a black Anglia. He told Mrs Carey he was taking Gerry and his three brothers away for a while. Someone had contacted the ISPCC and told them of the Careys dire circumstances. Gerry will never forget watching his distraught mother through the back window of the Anglia as he was driven away with his brothers. Mrs Carey was wringing her arms in despair as she watched her beloved sons being taken away.

That fateful day changed Gerry Carey’s life forever. He ended up spending the next eight years in St Joseph’s Industrial School in Salthill, Co Galway, which was run by the Christian Brothers. His incarceration in St Joseph’s was punctuated by physical, psychological and sexual abuse and his traumatic experiences there nearly broke him. Gerry eventually ended up a homeless alcoholic begging on the streets for booze money during the day and sleeping in a hostel for the homeless at night.

Gerry Carey’s story is one of 11 told in Haunting Cries – a book I have written about the abuse of children in Irish religious institutions. Their stories mirror those of thousands who were incarcerated in abusive institutions run by religious orders. That legacy of abuse was the focus of much outpouring of grief last year when the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse published its report. The Ryan Report provoked a tsunami of grief as a shocked Irish nation absorbed its gut-wrenching accounts of institutional brutality; accounts that validated the stories survivors of child abuse had been telling us for years.

People shook their heads in disbelief and asked how those acting in the name of God could have behaved so callously. We pledged never to forget this grim chapter in our history.

A year on, those promises have faded like the distant echo of a drum retreating into history as Ireland titters on the brink of economic implosion and edges ever closer to International Monetary Fund and European Union intervention. The potential loss of sovereign control over national purses has catapulted us into a state of paralysis. It is as if Damocles himself is dangling his sword over all of our futures. We are jaded and worn down by daily doses of bad news and we have little capacity to be reminded of past stories of child institutional abuse.

That intolerance to misery is understandable. But we ignore the past at our peril. It is no coincidence that a State that so shamefully facilitated the past incarceration of vulnerable children into the clutches of abusive religious institutions is today grappling with the enormous consequences of a different legacy of abuse; this time one conducted by a bunch of casino bankers, cowboy developers and incompetent, weak and irresponsible regulators, politicians and civil servants who failed to put the brakes on an overheating property bubble.

This thread of dysfunction has coursed through our historical veins since the foundation of the State when Ireland was hijacked by an all-powerful Roman Catholic Church and an army of loyal followers led by Éamon de Valera, whose supine support for the church guaranteed its grip over the State for decades. That lethal marriage of theocracy and autocracy facilitated the creation of a nanny state where a culture of fear, poverty, ignorance and conservatism gave those in authority dangerous powers.

Those powers enabled a judicial system to try children without proper legal representation because they were too poor to afford a lawyer. Draconian sentences were handed down for minor offences such as mitching from school or stealing bars of chocolate. Unfortunate children were exiled to hellholes like Daingean, Letterfrack and Artane – names that are now synonymous with unremitting brutality.

The Department of Education was another instrument of the State that failed to supervise abusive religious institutions. In April 1954, the then minister for education Sean Moylan addressed queries in the Dáil about a young boy called Mickey Flanagan who was incarcerated in Artane Industrial School. Mickey’s arm had been broken in three places after a Christian Brother beat him with the handle of a brush. His mother had approached her local TD, who in turn raised Mickey’s case in the Dáil.

Moylan dismissed the violence against Mickey as an isolated incident and he told the House he could not conceive that men who had been trained for a life of sacrifice and austerity could be capable of sadism. Had Moylan intervened and conducted a thorough inspection of Artane, he could have prevented the cruelty that continued there until its closure in 1969.

For decades we trusted the State and church to manage significant chunks of our lives, from our education and health to the moulding of our moral values and sexual mores. During the Celtic Tiger years, the State seemed to have swapped its blind support of the church for a naive endorsement of the bankers and developers.

That deference has had devastating consequences. We only have to witness the rapid unravelling of our erstwhile wealth to see how our culture of nepotism and cronyism enabled the bankers and developers to hijack our economy for their own self-interested greed. They threw the dice on our futures and gambled away our financial security – unfettered capitalism facilitated by the State. Now that wealth has to be rebuilt.

In what is a fitting illustration of our cute hoor culture, the man who led the country for most of the boom years today grins out of a cupboard in a television ad mumbling something about a match. And the pubic performance of Bertie Ahern’s successor is little better. Brian Cowen’s cringing interview on RTÉ radio’s Morning Ireland , following his night of revelry in Galway, reflected a staggering disconnection from a nation gripped by fear. His asinine behaviour cost us dearly both financially and in reputation.

Our naive trust in the State and government meant we too readily bought into their empty promises of soft landings and perpetual wealth. We believed the economists who were trotted out to reinforce the myth that this gutsy, swashbuckling island nation of ours was bucking the trend of financial norms and facing decades of prosperity.

That heady cocktail of arrogance and fables meant we too eagerly approved the light regulation that enabled the bankers to stuff our pockets with enough money to drown our over priced pads in crippling mortgages. So we all share a collective responsibility in our current economic woes – just as, in the past, villagers turned away from the ragged boys who ran terrified from Daingean reformatory school as they were hunted down like animals by the Brothers running the place.

Today the cracks in our State structures continue. Take our healthcare system. The Health Service Executive’s response to budget cuts is to cancel surgeries, shut wards and shove ever more patients on waiting lists instead of tackling its own burgeoning administrative costs and coming up with more visionary ways of cost-efficiencies. And this is the same healthcare system that is still failing to look after vulnerable children in its care.

But it’s not all hopeless. These tough times can give us golden opportunities for radical change; a chance to rid ourselves of this national cancer of cronyism, to enable the birth of a modern, progressive, entrepreneurial country that fosters responsible behaviour where transparency and accountability replace the grubby, shifty, wheeling-dealing culture that allowed the gangsters of commerce to bring this country to its knees. We need to streamline our public sector, modernise our trade unions, foster private enterprise and ensure that our hard-earned money isn’t frittered away again by those purporting to be looking after us.

Our political system needs a radical overhaul to encourage a more dynamic mix of men and women in Dáil Éireann. And we need to build a fairer society where the poor are not subsidising the elite.

It is possible to rebuild from the ashes of despair. Gerry Carey is an inspiring example. When he left Salthill he became an alcoholic and spent years living in a drunken haze. His addiction to booze destroyed his marriage and eventually he was asked to leave the family home.

He ended up sleeping in a hostel for the homeless in Dublin and begging for drink money during the day. Then in 1998, when he was 40, he had a Damascene conversion that propelled him on a road to recovery.

It followed an eight-day drinking binge with a fellow destitute. The pair had received a windfall payment from the social welfare and they went on an almighty pub crawl. On the eighth day, when Gerry woke up in the hostel in an alcoholic stupor, he could barely move. His drinking buddy banged on the door and practically dragged him to a pub in Temple Bar where the pair lashed into the pints.

When Gerry was drinking his second pint he looked around the bar and turned to his fellow vagrant and vowed that he would never drink again. His bemused friend laughed at him.

But Gerry was serious.

After that momentous day, he went into rehab and began to rebuild his life. He trained as a counsellor for survivors of abuse; he secured a council flat in central Dublin and he re-established relations with his family. Today he remains sober and has just started working in a new centre in Galway for survivors of child abuse.

Gerry Carey’s story should give us all hope. If he can pick himself up from the gutter then surely we, as a nation working together, can do the same?

Haunting Cries by has just been published. Karen Coleman presents The Wide Angle on Newstalk on Sunday mornings

In a week when the Pope’s right-hand man pointed to homosexuality as the cause of paedophilia, FINTAN O’TOOLE looks at the church’s response to the child abuse cover-up and asks what it is all about

THERE IS A word that became current towards the fag end of the Northern Ireland conflict, when evil had been reduced to banalities. An atrocity against one community would often be met on the other side, not with either outright support or condemnation but with “what-aboutery”. Yes, some would shrug, this is terrible but what about Bloody Sunday? What about Enniskillen? What about Cromwell?

That this form of moral evasion had its very own name was a mark of how pitiful and desperate it was. Even those who engaged in it knew that it was a last refuge. When the indefensible could not be defended, the only remaining strategy was to present the perpetrators as victims, and those who criticised atrocities as hypocrites.

As evidenced by this week’s attempt by Pope Benedict’s right-hand man, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, to blame homosexuals for the crisis in the church, what-aboutery is now the mainstay of the Vatican’s response to the continuing revelation of its global strategy of covering up the abuse of children by priests.

For a short period leading up to the issuing of Pope Benedict’s pastoral letter to the Irish faithful last month, the Vatican seemed to be inching towards some tentative reflection on its own moral responsibility for the protection of abusers. But as the flood of allegations has risen ever closer to the Pope’s own door, humility has been replaced by an aggressive backlash.

The church leadership has now adopted a three-fold strategy: blame the victims; invoke anti-Catholic persecution; and identify modernity as the root of the problem. Benedict himself began the process of blaming the victims in his Palm Sunday sermon when he spoke of not allowing oneself to be “intimidated by the petty gossip of dominant opinion”. This was not an accidental or thoughtless phrase. It was directly echoed on Easter Sunday by Cardinal Angelo Sodano, former Vatican secretary of state and currently dean of the College of Cardinals.

He urged Benedict not to be dismayed by “the petty gossip of the moment, by the trials that sometimes assail the community of believers”. In one magisterial phrase, the stories of those who were attacked as children and the demands for accountability are dismissed as malicious tittle-tattle.

The next step of painting the church leadership, not as powerful people with questions to answer, but as innocent victims of persecution, was taken by the preacher to the papal household, Fr Raniero Cantalamessa.

Showing that no strategy is too tasteless to be deployed, he cited a letter from a “Jewish friend”, comparing attacks on the church’s record on child abuse to “the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism”. Cantalamessa himself linked demands for accountability in the church to the “herd psychology” and the search for a scapegoat through which “the weakest element, the different one” is victimised. The ironies in this exercise in self-pity are almost beyond satire.

Redefining the Pope, his cardinals and his bishops as the “weakest” members of society would be peculiar in any context. But in the context of child abuse, it is grotesque. And claiming the status of “the different one”, the outsider who suffers from stereotyping and discrimination, is a bit rich for a church that is happy to perpetuate, as Bertone did this week, the vile stereotype that identifies homosexuality and paedophilia.

If the church insists on drawing analogies with anti-Semitism, it might be well advised to avoid the subject of its attitudes to gay people altogether.

Underlying all of this, however, is a more considered strategy of constructing an intellectual framework within which an official narrative of the crisis can emerge. That narrative is self-consciously reactionary. The church was fine when it had authority in society. That authority was challenged by liberalism, free thinking and sexual openness, and paedophilia is the result.

In his pastoral letter to Irish Catholics, Benedict could not have been more explicit about this. He urged the faithful to understand the crisis as a consequence of “new and serious challenges to the faith arising from the rapid transformation and secularisation of Irish society”.

“Fast-paced social change has occurred, often adversely affecting people’s traditional adherence to Catholic teaching and values.”

As an explanation for paedophile priests and for the abysmal institutional response to their crimes, this bears hardly a moment’s scrutiny.

In the Irish context alone, we know from the Ryan report that systematic child abuse by Catholic brothers, priests and nuns goes back at the very least to the 1930s and almost certainly beyond. We know from the Murphy report that “there is a two thousand year history of Biblical, Papal and Holy See statements showing awareness of clerical child sex abuse . . . it is clear that cases were dealt with by Archbishop McQuaid in the 1950s and 1960s”.

And even if one were to accept the highly dubious contention that paedophile priests are a result of the move towards greater sexual openness from the 1960s onwards, how would that explain the most damaging aspect of the scandal – the cover-up by bishops and the Vatican?

These strategies may be as desperate as they are clumsily evasive. But they are arguably necessary to the survival of the church’s current power structures. For if the organised cover-up of child abuse is not about petty gossip, not about victimising a defenceless Pope and not about secular modernity, what is it about? This is a question to which Benedict cannot give an honest answer because that answer would threaten the very system he embodies.

Some liberal critics of the church often fail to answer the question, too. They may blame Catholicism itself, as if other belief systems did not end up justifying vile crimes. They may blame celibacy, as if the vast majority of attacks on children were not perpetrated by non-celibates – often, indeed, by the child’s own parents. The truth is that child abuse and cover-up are not primarily about religion or sex. They are about power. The bleak lessons of human history are that those who have too much power will abuse it. And that organisations will put their own interests above those of the victims.

THE BEHAVIOUR OF the institutional Catholic church in Ireland and around the world is certainly a stark example of both of these truths. But it is not the only example, even in contemporary Ireland. The Irish Amateur Swimming Association, for example, gave coaches the power to do what they liked to children and then engaged in a process of denial that was, albeit on a much smaller scale, essentially the same as that of the bishops.

The problem is not swimming, any more than it is Catholicism. It is power.

The church’s combination of temporal authority, spiritual control and a closed, internal hierarchy created the power that corrupted it. The backlash of the past few weeks has merely confirmed what was already overwhelmingly likely: that Benedict is entirely incapable of grasping this reality, let alone altering it. He has spent much of his career crushing dissent and rolling back the anti-hierarchical spirit of Vatican 2. His solution, as he suggested in his pastoral letter, is more of the same – more obedience, more authority, more resistance to secular modernity.

Those who looked to the Pope to respond to one of the most profound crises in the history of the church now know they will have to look elsewhere.

The Irish Times – Friday, April 16, 2010
Church in worst credibility crisis since Reformation, theologian tells bishops
HANS KÜNG

Pope Benedict has made worse just about everything that is wrong with the Roman Catholic Church and is directly responsible for engineering the global cover-up of child rape perpetrated by priests, according to this open letter to all Catholic bishops

VENERABLE BISHOPS,

Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and I were the youngest theologians at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965. Now we are the oldest and the only ones still fully active. I have always understood my theological work as a service to the Roman Catholic Church. For this reason, on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the election of Pope Benedict XVI, I am making this appeal to you in an open letter. In doing so, I am motivated by my profound concern for our church, which now finds itself in the worst credibility crisis since the Reformation. Please excuse the form of an open letter; unfortunately, I have no other way of reaching you.

I deeply appreciated that the pope invited me, his outspoken critic, to meet for a friendly, four-hour-long conversation shortly after he took office. This awakened in me the hope that my former colleague at Tubingen University might find his way to promote an ongoing renewal of the church and an ecumenical rapprochement in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council.

Unfortunately, my hopes and those of so many engaged Catholic men and women have not been fulfilled. And in my subsequent correspondence with the pope, I have pointed this out to him many times. Without a doubt, he conscientiously performs his everyday duties as pope, and he has given us three helpful encyclicals on faith, hope and charity. But when it comes to facing the major challenges of our times, his pontificate has increasingly passed up more opportunities than it has taken:

Missed is the opportunity for rapprochement with the Protestant churches: Instead, they have been denied the status of churches in the proper sense of the term and, for that reason, their ministries are not recognized and intercommunion is not possible.

Missed is the opportunity for the long-term reconciliation with the Jews: Instead the pope has reintroduced into the liturgy a preconciliar prayer for the enlightenment of the Jews, he has taken notoriously anti-Semitic and schismatic bishops back into communion with the church, and he is actively promoting the beatification of Pope Pius XII, who has been accused of not offering sufficient protections to Jews in Nazi Germany.

The fact is, Benedict sees in Judaism only the historic root of Christianity; he does not take it seriously as an ongoing religious community offering its own path to salvation. The recent comparison of the current criticism faced by the pope with anti-Semitic hate campaigns – made by Rev Raniero Cantalamessa during an official Good Friday service at the Vatican – has stirred up a storm of indignation among Jews around the world.

Missed is the opportunity for a dialogue with Muslims in an atmosphere of mutual trust: Instead, in his ill-advised but symptomatic 2006 Regensburg lecture, Benedict caricatured Islam as a religion of violence and inhumanity and thus evoked enduring Muslim mistrust.

Missed is the opportunity for reconciliation with the colonised indigenous peoples of Latin America: Instead, the pope asserted in all seriousness that they had been “longing” for the religion of their European conquerors.

Missed is the opportunity to help the people of Africa by allowing the use of birth control to fight overpopulation and condoms to fight the spread of HIV.

Missed is the opportunity to make peace with modern science by clearly affirming the theory of evolution and accepting stem-cell research.

Missed is the opportunity to make the spirit of the Second Vatican Council the compass for the whole Catholic Church, including the Vatican itself, and thus to promote the needed reforms in the church.

This last point, respected bishops, is the most serious of all. Time and again, this pope has added qualifications to the conciliar texts and interpreted them against the spirit of the council fathers. Time and again, he has taken an express stand against the Ecumenical Council, which according to canon law represents the highest authority in the Catholic Church:

He has taken the bishops of the traditionalist Pius X Society back into the church without any preconditions – bishops who were illegally consecrated outside the Catholic Church and who reject central points of the Second Vatican Council (including liturgical reform, freedom of religion and the rapprochement with Judaism).

He promotes the medieval Tridentine Mass by all possible means and occasionally celebrates the Eucharist in Latin with his back to the congregation.

He refuses to put into effect the rapprochement with the Anglican Church, which was laid out in official ecumenical documents by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, and has attempted instead to lure married Anglican clergy into the Roman Catholic Church by freeing them from the very rule of celibacy that has forced tens of thousands of Roman Catholic priests out of office.

He has actively reinforced the anti-conciliar forces in the church by appointing reactionary officials to key offices in the Curia (including the secretariat of state, and positions in the liturgical commission) while appointing reactionary bishops around the world.

Pope Benedict XVI seems to be increasingly cut off from the vast majority of church members who pay less and less heed to Rome and, at best, identify themselves only with their local parish and bishop.

I know that many of you are pained by this situation. In his anti-conciliar policy, the pope receives the full support of the Roman Curia. The Curia does its best to stifle criticism in the episcopate and in the church as a whole and to discredit critics with all the means at its disposal. With a return to pomp and spectacle catching the attention of the media, the reactionary forces in Rome have attempted to present us with a strong church fronted by an absolutistic “Vicar of Christ” who combines the church’s legislative, executive and judicial powers in his hands alone. But Benedict’s policy of restoration has failed. All of his spectacular appearances, demonstrative journeys and public statements have failed to influence the opinions of most Catholics on controversial issues. This is especially true regarding matters of sexual morality. Even the papal youth meetings, attended above all by conservative-charismatic groups, have failed to hold back the steady drain of those leaving the church or to attract more vocations to the priesthood.

You in particular, as bishops, have reason for deep sorrow: Tens of thousands of priests have resigned their office since the Second Vatican Council, for the most part because of the celibacy rule. Vocations to the priesthood, but also to religious orders, sisterhoods and lay brotherhoods are down – not just quantitatively but qualitatively. Resignation and frustration are spreading rapidly among both the clergy and the active laity. Many feel that they have been left in the lurch with their personal needs, and many are in deep distress over the state of the church. In many of your dioceses, it is the same story: increasingly empty churches, empty seminaries and empty rectories. In many countries, due to the lack of priests, more and more parishes are being merged, often against the will of their members, into ever larger “pastoral units,” in which the few surviving pastors are completely overtaxed. This is church reform in pretense rather than fact!

And now, on top of these many crises comes a scandal crying out to heaven – the revelation of the clerical abuse of thousands of children and adolescents, first in the United States, then in Ireland and now in Germany and other countries. And to make matters worse, the handling of these cases has given rise to an unprecedented leadership crisis and a collapse of trust in church leadership.

There is no denying the fact that the worldwide system of covering up cases of sexual crimes committed by clerics was engineered by the Roman Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger (1981-2005). During the reign of Pope John Paul II, that congregation had already taken charge of all such cases under oath of strictest silence. Ratzinger himself, on May 18th, 2001, sent a solemn document to all the bishops dealing with severe crimes ( “epistula de delictis gravioribus” ), in which cases of abuse were sealed under the “secretum pontificium” , the violation of which could entail grave ecclesiastical penalties. With good reason, therefore, many people have expected a personal mea culpa on the part of the former prefect and current pope. Instead, the pope passed up the opportunity afforded by Holy Week: On Easter Sunday, he had his innocence proclaimed “urbi et orbi” by the dean of the College of Cardinals.

The consequences of all these scandals for the reputation of the Catholic Church are disastrous. Important church leaders have already admitted this. Numerous innocent and committed pastors and educators are suffering under the stigma of suspicion now blanketing the church. You, reverend bishops, must face up to the question: What will happen to our church and to your diocese in the future? It is not my intention to sketch out a new program of church reform. That I have done often enough both before and after the council. Instead, I want only to lay before you six proposals that I am convinced are supported by millions of Catholics who have no voice in the current situation.

1. Do not keep silent: By keeping silent in the face of so many serious grievances, you taint yourselves with guilt. When you feel that certain laws, directives and measures are counterproductive, you should say this in public. Send Rome not professions of your devotion, but rather calls for reform!

2. Set about reform: Too many in the church and in the episcopate complain about Rome, but do nothing themselves. When people no longer attend church in a diocese, when the ministry bears little fruit, when the public is kept in ignorance about the needs of the world, when ecumenical co-operation is reduced to a minimum, then the blame cannot simply be shoved off on Rome. Whether bishop, priest, layman or laywoman – everyone can do something for the renewal of the church within his own sphere of influence, be it large or small. Many of the great achievements that have occurred in the individual parishes and in the church at large owe their origin to the initiative of an individual or a small group. As bishops, you should support such initiatives and, especially given the present situation, you should respond to the just complaints of the faithful.

3. Act in a collegial way: After heated debate and against the persistent opposition of the Curia, the Second Vatican Council decreed the collegiality of the pope and the bishops. It did so in the sense of the Acts of the Apostles, in which Peter did not act alone without the college of the apostles. In the post-conciliar era, however, the pope and the Curia have ignored this decree. Just two years after the council, Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical defending the controversial celibacy law without the slightest consultation of the bishops. Since then, papal politics and the papal magisterium have continued to act in the old, uncollegial fashion. Even in liturgical matters, the pope rules as an autocrat over and against the bishops. He is happy to surround himself with them as long as they are nothing more than stage extras with neither voices nor voting rights. This is why, venerable bishops, you should not act for yourselves alone, but rather in the community of the other bishops, of the priests and of the men and women who make up the church.

4. Unconditional obedience is owed to God alone: Although at your episcopal consecration you had to take an oath of unconditional obedience to the pope, you know that unconditional obedience can never be paid to any human authority; it is due to God alone. For this reason, you should not feel impeded by your oath to speak the truth about the current crisis facing the church, your diocese and your country. Your model should be the apostle Paul, who dared to oppose Peter “to his face since he was manifestly in the wrong”! ( Galatians 2:11 ). Pressuring the Roman authorities in the spirit of Christian fraternity can be permissible and even necessary when they fail to live up to the spirit of the Gospel and its mission. The use of the vernacular in the liturgy, the changes in the regulations governing mixed marriages, the affirmation of tolerance, democracy and human rights, the opening up of an ecumenical approach, and the many other reforms of Vatican II were only achieved because of tenacious pressure from below.

5. Work for regional solutions: The Vatican has frequently turned a deaf ear to the well-founded demands of the episcopate, the priests and the laity. This is all the more reason for seeking wise regional solutions. As you are well aware, the rule of celibacy, which was inherited from the Middle Ages, represents a particularly delicate problem. In the context of today’s clerical abuse scandal, the practice has been increasingly called into question. Against the expressed will of Rome, a change would appear hardly possible; yet this is no reason for passive resignation. When a priest, after mature consideration, wishes to marry, there is no reason why he must automatically resign his office when his bishop and his parish choose to stand behind him. Individual episcopal conferences could take the lead with regional solutions. It would be better, however, to seek a solution for the whole church, therefore:

6. Call for a council: Just as the achievement of liturgical reform, religious freedom, ecumenism and inter-religious dialogue required an ecumenical council, so now a council is needed to solve the dramatically escalating problems calling for reform. In the century before the Reformation, the Council of Constance decreed that councils should be held every five years. Yet the Roman Curia successfully managed to circumvent this ruling. There is no question that the Curia, fearing a limitation of its power, would do everything in its power to prevent a council coming together in the present situation. Thus it is up to you to push through the calling of a council or at least a representative assembly of bishops.

With the church in deep crisis, this is my appeal to you, venerable bishops: Put to use the episcopal authority that was reaffirmed by the Second Vatican Council. In this urgent situation, the eyes of the world turn to you. Innumerable people have lost their trust in the Catholic Church. Only by openly and honestly reckoning with these problems and resolutely carrying out needed reforms can their trust be regained. With all due respect, I beg you to do your part – together with your fellow bishops as far as possible, but also alone if necessary – in apostolic “fearlessness” ( Acts 4:29, 31 ). Give your faithful signs of hope and encouragement and give our church a perspective for the future.

With warm greetings in the community of the Christian faith,

Yours, Hans Küng – (New York Times Syndicate) © Hans Küng

Bruce Arnold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Irish Independent 27th March 2010

barnold@independent.ie