WHAT I want to know is this: how do so many intelligent people still give their allegiance to the Catholic Church? Now I know that nobody is perfect and that there are flaws in every institution. And that it’s wrong to be too exacting in the demands we make on other people because when it comes down to it, we ourselves are often found lacking. But I still come back to that opening question: how do so many apparently intelligent and sensitive people still give their allegiance to the Catholic Church when that institution reeks of hypocrisy from its every pore and orifice in relation to the issue of child sex abuse.
Over the past year, Eamonn McCann has written on a number of occasions in these pages about the simmering scandal of child sex abuse within the Church – and the calculated cover-up in which the Church authorities both in Ireland and elsewhere have been engaged. Now the revelations concerning Fr Brendan Smyth of the Norbertine Order, who is currently serving a four-year sentence in Northern Ireland for child sex abuse offences, have thrown the issue into even sharper focus. Despite the fact that Smyth had a previous history of imposing his unwanted sexual attentions on innocent children, the Abbot of the Norbertine Order in Ireland Fr Kevin Smith approved his appointment as chaplain in Tralee General Hospital – a position in which he would come into direct contact with children, and in which those children would be particularly vulnerable to his clerical insinuations. The Abbot’s judgement in this matter was clearly foul – but in many ways what it reflects is infinitely more serious. Because the approach of the Catholic Church on issues of this nature has always been to sweep the problem under the carpet, pretend that nothing happened – and specifically in the context of child sex abuse create the conditions in which a clerical perpetrator would be free to repeat his crimes against new, innocent victims. Paedophile priests whose activities were uncovered were quickly moved on to different schools, parishes or dioceses. There a whole new set of victims would be subject to their sick attentions. And if parents or children complained, and the heat came down, they’d be moved on again. The sexual abuse of children is a crime. So are those senior Church figures who decided on this policy not in fact accessories to the crimes of the paedophile priests operating under their religious imprimatur? I believe that they are.
Nuala O’Faoláin, who is certainly a moderate where issues concerning the Catholic Church are concerned put it well: “Maybe what has been reported isn’t true. But if it is, I wouldn’t insult the idea of God by accepting that the Catholic Church in Ireland has anything to do with Him.” She then went on to detail the kind of hypocrisy and evasion which is par for the course in this area among the clergy. In a letter in 1992 Cardinal Cathal Daly pleaded that he could not intervene where Fr Brendan Smyth was concerned because a priest “is not governed by a bishop, but by his own abbot, and only his own abbot can tackle the problem”. Jesus Christ, Cardinal Cathal Daly, and other members of the hierarchy, could intervene in any number of affairs of the State, and wield enormous, often unseen influence in the process – and yet he couldn’t do anything to ensure that a priest whom he knew to be a paedophile was not put in a position to molest and debase young children. “What many people don’t realise,” the Bishop of Ossory Lawrence Forristal is quoted elsewhere as saying, “is that each diocese is an independent unit and forms its own independent policies.” In this he is echoing a statement of Cardinal Daly’s in that same 1992 letter to a parent: “I am sorry that your trouble continues and I understand your deep concern for your own family and for other children . . . being no longer the Bishop of Down and Connor, I do not have the same right to intervene . . .”
These are weasel words, the only possible explanation for which could be the Cardinal’s desire to preserve the status quo. But, as I said, this is the Church’s standard line, putting its own vested interests before any sense of justice, the common good or even the welfare of children – about which they engage in such appalling pretences when it suits them.
The machinations in which the Catholic Church engaged to protect those priests and brothers who have been guilty of child sex abuse have been documented elsewhere. The new line is that they simply didn’t understand the nature of paedophilia, or its impact on the victims. But that simply won’t wash. Because the policy they have pursued in this area corresponds exactly to their actions in relation to priests who father children. Again, historically they have engaged in every kind of evasion possible, denying children the right to know their father, and denying women and children the right to support by moving priests from diocese to diocese, State to State or country to country.
They will have no credibility on the issue of child sex abuse until they also come clean on the question of child support for all those kids whom priests have fathered over the past twenty years – not to mention all those who will be born in the future. Somehow, I think we’ll be waiting.
• Niall Stokes
Editor