Desire to protect Church meant crimes not reported: Dublin Diocese Inquiry
Sunday Independent 22 November 2009
THE four Catholic archbishops of Dublin who preceded Dr Diarmuid Martin, were aware of complaints against priests for sexually abusing children — a practice that went on for over 35 years.
But the most senior figures in the Irish hierarchy did not report these crimes to the gardai because of an obsessive culture of secrecy and a desire to preserve the power and aura of the Church and to avoid giving scandal to their congregations.
The report of the Commission set up to investigate how the Dublin Archdiocese dealt with sex abuse scandals from 1975 to 2004 will find that there was little or no concern for the welfare of the abused children or other children who might come into contact with deviant and even paedophile priests.
While the Commission will find that there was no evidence of a paedophile ring operating among priests in the Dublin Archdiocese, there were distressing connections between more than 40 priests serving in parishes and religious orders in the diocese.
Some boys who were abused by one priest were later passed on to their friends and abused again. In another case, the notorious sex abuser Fr Sean Fortune, who committed suicide, gave the key of a holiday cottage to another priest who abused a girl there.
The Commission, which has trawled through thousands of files over more than nine years, will find that the powerful bishops of Dublin were more concerned with the power and pomp of their Church than they were with the children in their care.
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