Child Abuse
Newspaper Articlessitemap privacy © 2003
The only thing that is 'grossly incorrect' about the BBC Panorama broadcast is Michael Mullaney's blatently unfair and factually obfuscatory denunciation of it's content (Irish Independent, October 3).
Fr Mullany and his culpable church should be keeping their collective head down and pursuing a policy of solicitous caring and profound penitential apology, rather than reacting in unfounded criticism and downright lies to a fair and balanced broadcast.
The 1962 Crimens Solicitationis document, a highly secret church directive, made public in defiance of church policy only in recent years, was indeed concerned with secrecy from scandal, a major concern of the Roman Catholic Church.
The church was very well aware at that time of the existance of rampant homosexuality and frequent incidental paedophilia within it's ranks. No amount of obstanate denial or arcane canonical kant will deny this basic truth.
Anyone in the church hierarchy who was ignorant of these realities was living in cloud cukoo land, a place that should be very familiar to Fr Mullany, if not to the then papal eminance grise, Cardinal Ratzinger.
"Misleading, malicious, false and inaccurate" are adjectives used by Fr Mullaney about the BBC program that better describe his own church's initial reaction to the scandal, rather than the BBC broadcast.
Moreover, 2001 was a bit late in the piece for the reluctant church's action which was painfully slow in coming.
The atrocious conniving by the CORI group in negotiating the apportionment of the lion's share of the settlement costs to the Irish taxpayer on behalf of the church, the largest landowner in the country, during a major property boom still beggars belief.
JODY GEOGHEGAN,
CO WESTMEATH.