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	Irish Catholic Church Ready to Pay More Child Abuse Compensation By David Sharrock The Times (United Kingdom) May 25, 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article6354966.ece The Catholic Church in Ireland gave a clear signal today that it will bow to rising public anger over decades of horrific and systemic physical and sexual abuse of children in its institutions by agreeing to share a greater burden of the compensation bill. A personal assistant to the country's top cleric and a bishop both said that a compensation deal made with the government in 2002 should be renegotiated, following the publication last week of a nine-year-long inquiry's report into abuse. It found that 800 priests, monks and nuns committed horrifying acts of abuse on their young charges under a system in which rape and violence was endemic. Only a handful have ever been prosecuted and convicted. Opposition political leaders have called for a renegotiation of the compensation deal which meant that the Catholic religious orders were liable for only 10 per cent of the estimated €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion) final compensation bill. In return orders such as the Christian Brothers were indemnified against further claims. Father Timothy Bartlett, who is Cardinal Sean Brady's personal assistant, said: "I believe personally there is no question but that the agreement must be looked at again. In my personal view, they need to pay more." After making a humble apology during Sunday mass, Dr Noel Treanor, the Bishop of Down and Connor, called Fatherr Bartlett's comments "a comment of integrity … I salute his courage and I support him. We simply have to see this evil and [look] the crimes that were perpetrated straight in the face and that means we have to examine why they happened. "That will require an inter-disciplinary discussion with people who are members of the Church, involving victims, those who were abused and indeed going beyond the borders of our Church so that we have the best anthropological and scientific analysis available to try and understand why this happened. "One can simplify. It can be said that this was due to celibacy. Institutions which were not run by clergy nor by celibates have had the same problems. Nonetheless it happened within our Church which claims to be inspired by the values of Jesus Christ and to care for the most vulnerable in our society. "Failures occurred on the part of some, besmirching all of us, undoing the good work of the many of us who gave their lives and energies totally to these people. This has to be examined, it calls out for examination." Thousands of members of the public have signed a 'book of solidarity' for victims of the abuse in Dublin's Mansion House since it was opened over the weekend. Bertie Ahern, the former Taoiseach who was in office when the indemnity was agreed on the eve of a general election, said that he was proud of the deal his government struck with the religious orders. "If I did not take the actions that I took, if I didn't follow it through, none of this would have come to light other than a few television programmes and a few articles written," he said. "I took it on, I put the legislative base in place and that's the real issue — that we've dealt with it, we've brought it to the fore." He told Newstalk Radio: "We haven't given compensation, we've given redress. That's the issue that we should be focusing on." Mr Ahern also said he agreed that the perpetrators' names should be made public. The Christian Brothers successfully blocked the child abuse commission from naming perpetrators, but since the report's publication their real names have been substituted in newspapers and television and radio reports for the pseudonyms which some of the most notorious abusers were officially granted.
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