Suffer Little Children

In November 1993, I wrote in Hot Press that: “The Catholic hierarchy won’t get away much longer with its lack of response to the rush of revelations about physical, sexual and psychological abuse done to children placed in its care.”

I was wrong. They have continued to get away with it up to and all through the decade just closing. They are getting away with it still.
In August 1997, I called for “a cross-border inquiry into the role of the Catholic Church in child sex abuse... If that seems too fanciful, let’s have two separate State inquiries... The argument [for an inquiry] is strengthened by the fact that children were abused while in the custody of the State.”
In February 1998, the column concluded by observing that, “The argument for a Tribunal does not rest on one case, but on a pattern of the Church at the highest administrative level covering up instances of abuse and helping abusers to avoid justice.”
In September 1999, the column remarked that, “The effrontery has been bare-faced and breathtaking. The notion that the bishops had been ignorant until revelations in recent years is the opposite of the truth. No group of people in the land knew more. And no group did less with the knowledge they had... [If any other organisation] in this situation were to sit tight and sing dumb and change the locks on the filing cupboards, wouldn’t we stir up a political storm? But [Church] leaders seem confident they have brazened it out.”
In April 2002, I wrote, “A Tribunal of Inquiry [should] have been established years ago, witnesses subpoenaed and all relevant documents compelled... [Instead], we have representatives of the Catholic Church interviewed respectfully about all manner of sensitive subjects.... Newspapers po-facedly report the opinions of Desmond Connell on abortion, as if he or anyone else running a haven for child abusers were in any position to pronounce to the rest of us on matters of personal morality.”
In May 2002, I observed that a Vatican “summit” on child abuse in the US “has in fact demonstrated that the Church at the highest level has no intention whatever of facing up to the issue and may be constitutionally quite incapable of so doing. In the US, as in Ireland, it is the State which must call the Church to account.”
In November 2002, it was written that, “Cardinal Connell, the Archbishop of Dublin, rightly stands accused of, at best, incompetence, at worst deliberately shielding the perpetrators of a ghastly crime... Desmond Connell should resign.”
In the same month, we wrote: “A number of bishops should be required to explain in public on a case-by-base basis how they responded to allegations of child sex abuse.... If it had been any other institution... a Tribunal would already be in session.”
In August 2005, it was asked here, “Don’t the civil authorities understand that the longer they allow the Church to hide its child abusers away, the more children are certain to be abused? We need a competent State inquiry now.”
In December 2007, referring to Mary McAleese, Dermot Ahern and Government Secretary Dermot McCarthy attending the promotion of Sean Brady to Cardinal in the Vatican: “What were they doing there? What business is it of the State who heads up the Irish section of the Catholic Church?... [Referring to child abuse] Brady lamented that, ‘These have been difficult, at times traumatic, years for the Church in Ireland.’
“Not as difficult or traumatic as for children subjected to sexual savagery by clerics...”
From August 2009: “Brady should be telling every diocese in Ireland to open its archives and publish in full all records of complaints of sex abuse, accounts of the response of the diocesan authorities and details of all communications with Rome in relation to the complaints and how they were handled. If the Church authorities won’t do this, the secular authorities should kick their doors down.”
The Ryan and Murphy reports revealed more than was previously in the public arena. But nothing new.
As the decade ends, the hypocrisy of the bishops soars to new heights. Without a single exception I’m aware of, they all put the institutional interests of the Church above children. They believe that the Catholic Church is the embodiment of God on earth. The reason nothing can take precedence over the interests of the Church is that nothing can take precedence over God. It’s not celibacy or the “institutional Church” or the failings of individual bishops which best explain the decades-long crime spree against children. It’s Catholicism itself, religion itself.