Bishop Says Pressure Groups Are Unfairly Targeting Churches, George Conger, Religious Intelligence, June 26, 2009

Bishop Says Pressure Groups Are Unfairly Targeting Churches

By George Conger.
Religious Intelligence
June 26, 2009

http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/news/?NewsID=4620

The Church of Ireland’s Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross has condemned the moves by pressure groups to use the findings of the Ryan Report on child abuse in Roman Catholic-run institutions to advance their own special interests and political campaigns.

Bishop says pressure groups are unfairly targeting churches

In the first public statement on the Ryan Report by an Anglican cleric in Ireland, Bishop Paul Bolton told his diocesan synod the needs of the victims of abuse should take precedence. “They must be the centre of all our concerns and efforts,” he said on June 13.

The Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), also known as the Ryan Report after the commission’s chair Justice Sean Ryan, examined the extent and effect of child abuse after 1936 in Reformatory and Industrial Schools operated by Roman Catholic religious orders and funded and supervised by the Irish Department of Education.

Released to the public on May 20, the report said it heard credible testimony of abuse of children by priests, brothers and nuns, and that some church officials covered up the crimes of pedophiles serving in the church, shielding them from arrest and prosecution through a “culture of self-serving secrecy.” The leader of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, Cardinal Sean Brady said he was "profoundly sorry and deeply ashamed that children suffered in such awful ways in these institutions. This report makes it clear that great wrong and hurt were caused to some of the most vulnerable children in our society. It documents a shameful catalogue of cruelty: neglect, physical, sexual and emotional abuse, perpetrated against children.”

Bishop Colton told the Cork Synod the findings of the Ryan Report revealed a “national trauma.” However, some groups had sought to use the report for their own ends, he noted.

“Some people in Ireland have used this report as a springboard towards a secularising agenda,’’ he said, while “others have called unthinkingly for the withdrawal of all churches from their modern-day engagement with education in a country, which, according to the last census, is still manifestly religious in its affiliation.

“Still others use an old-fashioned and distorted republicanism and link what happened with injustices in the pre-independence era,” he said while some commentators “expose the limitations of their own understanding of the modern, pluralist Ireland by speaking as if, even now in 2009, there is only one Christian denomination or religious grouping in this State.’’ Bishop Colton stated that “in the aftermath of the report, people who were abused should be the priority of this nation, its institutions and of all of us.”

“What I would say is that this shame must prompt us all in every church and in every institution in society to take a good hard look at ourselves, and to ask what abuses or inhuman injustices we are responsible for perpetuating or exacerbating today,” he told synod.