The Irish Times – Monday, December 28, 2009
CHURCH SCANDALS: This was the year when the Catholic Church was finally forced to account for its actions, in the face of two horrific reports, writes FINTAN O’TOOLE
COMING IN TO 2009, the Catholic Church and the Government knew at some level that this would be the year of truth. The Ryan commission on child abuse in church-run industrial schools and the Murphy commission on the cover-up of thousands of assaults on children by priests in the Dublin diocese had been sitting for some years.
The broad reality of the industrial-school system had already been detailed by survivors and, more clinically, by Eoin O’Sullivan and Mary Raftery in their book Suffer the Little Children . The system of cover-up that enabled clerical paedophiles to carry on with impunity had been previewed in the report on the Ferns diocese. Indeed, the Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin explicitly warned the faithful that the Murphy report would “shock us all”.
Given that the essence of the two reports was already known, and that the church and State authorities had so much time to prepare their responses, two obvious questions arise. Why did those reports indeed “shock us all”? And why did the authorities flounder for even a vaguely adequate response?
Part of the answer to the first question lies in the propensity for Irish culture to have “unknown knowns” – things that are known to be true but are treated as if they are outlandish fictions. No honest person seriously doubted that the industrial schools were instruments of terror and torture – why, otherwise, were children threatened with Letterfrack and Daingean, words that induced a numbing chill of fear? Likewise, many of the abusive priests were not secretive but behaved, on the contrary, with a flagrant and swaggering arrogance.
Yet, as dramatists have understood since the time of the ancient Greeks, there is often much more power in being forced to confront what you already know than in being amazed by the unexpected. And here, the language of both the Ryan and Murphy reports played a crucial role.
In both cases, the reports were written with a cold, clinical, relentless and above all unequivocal clarity. There were no qualifications, no escape hatches, no grounds for the “yes, but . . . ” or “what about . . . ?” that had been the constant refuge of the religious orders, the hierarchy and their apologists in the media. The lies, evasions and equivocations had to stop.
Continue reading »
