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	We're Still in Denial If We Think Child-Abuse Priests All Acted Alone By Terry Prone Herald November 30, 2009 http://www.herald.ie/incoming/were-still-in-denial-if-we-think-childabuse-priests-all-acted-alone-1958945.html Judge Yvonne Murphy didn't find a ring of paedophile priests in operation in the Dublin Archdiocese. True. But she found "worrying connections" between clerics who were, at various stages, convicted of child abuse. Dr Diarmuid Martin spotted the same disturbing connections. They bothered him enough to get him to make a request to the National Bureau of Criminal Investigation to ask them to investigate the possibility of such a ring. The possibility that priests who groped and raped children were working together is a horror too far. We shrink away from it. Our instinct is to regard it as a sensational but remote possibility. Except that this was the thinking that got us where we are today. Many of the clergymen who failed to act when parents came to them with complaints of child abuse believed that this kind of thing didn't happen. It was a misinterpretation. Or the parents were peculiar people. Or they were out for money. Or the little boy or girl involved was an attention-seeker. Or the priest might have done something inappropriate, but he was lonely, or drunk, or immature and he had expressed profound remorse and seen the error of his ways. It's called denial. It's called protection of the system. It's called "not giving scandal". And it caused brilliantly intelligent, highly educated men to be blind to what was screamingly obvious. (Before we blame only the bishops, let's not forget that many laypeople, too, refused to believe allegations against some beloved priests and ended up shunning families known to have made such allegations.) Since the Fr Sean Fortune episode, it's been clear that we should always start with the worst, not the best, scenario. We know, in the case of the Dublin report, that some priests implicated had more than a hundred victims. We know the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre and other organisations -- post the publication of the Commission Report -- were swamped with calls from victims who had never spoken of their abuse before. We know that some children were abused by more than one of the men named in the report. We cannot fail to ask the obvious question: were these abusers sharing information and -- worst of all -- sharing children? The answer is not necessarily in the affirmative. Some of the children were so traumatised by what had happened to them that their behaviour changed, worrying their parents, even though, in some cases, their parents didn't know the reason behind the behaviour change. So it would have seemed right and proper for church-going parents to trust another priest with the "rescue" of their troubled child. It would have seemed right and proper for that second priest to be given time alone with the child. What was wrong with the priest spending time in the child's room, when the parents were downstairs at the time? We now know what was wrong. We know that the second priest was abusing the child, all over again, in the child's own bedroom, undeterred by the proximity of the parents. But does that mean a paedophile ring was in operation? Not necessarily. Paedophiles have a genius for spotting fragile, vulnerable children who can easily be terrified into silence. They tend to be charming, manipulative people who groom, not only the child, but the family surrounding the child. In a situation where a child has already been abused, they don't have to have a child "handed on" by the earlier abuser: they can home in on the child, unaided. We've known for a while that failure by their superiors allowed abusive priests to move on and abuse a new group of children. We're beginning to realise that moving them along was a crime for another reason. It allowed other abusive priests to compound the horror visited on individual children by abusing them all over again. What we don't know, and what we must now find out, is if hierarchical failure to act on abuse allegations allowed paedophile priests the space to act in collusion with each other. Contact: hnews@herald.ie
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