The longer Cardinal Seán Brady stays in place as Primate of All Ireland, the greater the damage inflicted on the reputation of the Catholic Church in Ireland and beyond.
By Jenny McCartney
It has become a painfully self-evident truth – surely, even to the silent onlookers at the Vatican – that the longer Cardinal Seán Brady stays in place as Primate of All Ireland, the greater the damage inflicted on the reputation of the Catholic Church in Ireland and beyond. This is not simply because his presence has become a reminder of the cover-up of paedophile abuse by priests, but also because it illustrates a continuing problem: that, after all this time, Cardinal Brady just doesn’t get it.
By “get it” I mean that he still seems to believe that he personally behaved appropriately in the circumstances by which the late Father Brendan Smyth, a rapacious paedophile of almost unimaginable moral corruption, was tacitly permitted by the Church to continue brutally abusing children for 40 years, long after the ecclesiastical authorities knew what he was up to.
As set out in last week’s BBC2 documentary This World: The Shame of the Catholic Church, Father (as he then was) Brady was a 36-year-old canon lawyer who was brought in – along with two other priests – to investigate the case of Brendan Boland, a 14-year-old boy who had come forward to expose Fr Smyth as his abuser since the age of 11. Boland supplied names and addresses of other boys and girls who had been abused in similar fashion, and Father Brady contacted one of those boys.
Both Boland and the other boy were required to sign a formal oath of secrecy forbidding them to tell anyone except “authorised priests” what had gone on, and Fr Brady compiled two reports which were sent further up the Church hierarchy. The parents of none of the five children identified by Boland were informed of what had happened: indeed, Smyth continued to abuse two of those very children after the 1975 inquiry, and went on to rape and bugger a number of their younger siblings and cousins as well. I apologise for the explicit language, but evil found its hiding place in euphemism for too long.
The gist of Cardinal Brady’s modern-day argument is that mistakes were made, but that it was primarily the fault of Smyth’s superiors in the Norbertine Order, and that he did everything in his power at the time. He said in response to the documentary: “I had absolutely no authority over Brendan Smyth. Even my bishop had limited authority over him.” And it is in those two words “no authority” that you can hear the tolling bell for a lost conscience.
The Sunday Telegraph 6th May 2012
