An Irish catholic Tragedy, Matt C Abbott, Renew America, February 17, 2010

An Irish (catholic) Tragedy

By Matt C. Abbott
Renew America
February 17, 2010

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/abbott/100217

In light of recent headlines involving the Catholic Church in Ireland, I'm reprinting the Introduction to Joe Rigert's 2008 book An Irish Tragedy. Many thanks to Charles Eby of the Crossland Foundation for allowing me to reprint Rigert's material.

"Oh, the poor Irish," exclaimed Tony Flannery when I explained the purpose of my visit — to examine the scandal of clergy sex abuse in his country. Indeed, the Irish have suffered much: oppressed for generations under English rule, once decimated by famine, mired in the mud of poverty, victimized by prejudice as migrants to America. And now, shamed by the pervasive sexual abuses of their priests. Despite this history, Flannery was not defensive. As a leading critic and reformer in the Irish Catholic Church, a role that has cost him any prospects of career advancement, Flannery knows that healing can only come through addressing the church's problems openly and frankly.

My goal in traveling to Ireland was to get insights from people like Flannery on the causes and extent of sexual abuse in that country, and to determine to what extent Irish priests had contributed to the monstrous sex-scandal in the American church.

I didn't set out to write a book on Irish priests. Rather, I started my journey with a broad inquiry into the sexual involvements of Catholic bishops in North America and Europe. Upon retiring after 40 years in print journalism, I was struck by how the American priests were taking so much of the blame for the sex-abuse problem, while their superiors, the bishops, remained above it all. I had personal, as well as professional, reasons for pursuing the truth. My brother Jim, a priest and now-retired faculty member at the University of Notre Dame, told me how he felt under suspicion whenever he appeared publicly in priestly garb, as though he were one of the evil abusers. As for me, the scandal added to my doubts about the church that helped nurture and educate me. With my own genetic and journalistic distrust of power and authority, I wondered how many of the bishops had been involved in sex abuse and how they had avoided scrutiny.

Here was an opportunity to produce an epic story on one of the greatest scandals in the history of the Roman Catholic Church, rivaling the mere sale of tickets to heaven, which had led to the Protestant Reformation. How would the historians look upon this in the year 3,000? I would try to describe it here and now. Thus began my laborious task of collecting the names of every bishop publicly accused of sexual abuse, and then going from courthouse to courthouse in the United States and Canada, from Florida to California and British Columbia, reading every document on every errant bishop on my list. I also spoke with the attorneys and advocates for the victims and the victims themselves, as well as the few abusers who would talk to me. Then I spent two full months in Rome to inquire into sexual activity among the clerics of the Vatican itself, as well as the response of Vatican authorities — including the pope — to the sex-abuse problem. It was not an uplifting pilgrimage, not for an Oregon farm boy from a devout Catholic family, not for the youth who had mystic religious experiences during devotions in the small-town church in Beaverton, Oregon.

Before I had finished that research, however, the problem exploded into a church-wide crisis, beginning in Boston and spreading across America and Europe. Soon many of the bishops were publicly exposed for abuse and cover-up, and my findings lost much of their currency for publication. My decision: to make a U-turn and head for Ireland; find out why, in the citadel of Catholicism, native son Anthony O'Connell had become one of the worst abusers in the American hierarchy; and determine, if possible, how and why so many abusers like him had been produced in that country and exported to America.

But why pick on the Irish? I had no reason to question the integrity and morality of the Irish "fathers" I had known. O'Keefe was the pastor in the church of my boyhood, where I took the water and wine to the altar as a server at his masses. Casey presided over the marriage of my wife and me. Goodrich was the head of a nearby boys' school where my grandmother worked — more on him later. Fleming was the adviser for our Christian Family Movement group of young couples seeking social justice.

Still, the stories of sexual abuse and sexual involvements in Ireland were beginning to come out in newspapers and books and on television. They seemed to mirror the problems in America. Yes, there were the love affairs of Bishop Casey and the popular priest Cleary, the egregious abuses of Smyth and Fortune, and the slave-like conditions for girls and women at the Magdalen laundries, not to mention the abuse and neglect of boys at the industrial schools. Almost all of it was perpetrated by priests, religious brothers and nuns, and all within a tiny island country with a population about the size of that in Minnesota.

I wouldn't be able to tell whether there was more abuse among Irish priests than among the Germans, French, Italians and Poles. There were no studies to make that case one way or the other. But based on all the information at hand, I suspected that the problem was far worse for the Irish.

So I went to Ireland to try to answer the key question: Why? Why so much abuse in this Catholic nation? And would the answer in Ireland help to explain the high level of abuse in America, especially among the Irish priests? After all, missionary priests from Ireland helped build the American Catholic Church, and Irish-American clergymen are still a dominant force in the church. Have they also been a crippling force as part of the sex-abuse scandal?

Seeking answers to these questions, in Ireland I talked to priests, journalists, and experts, as well as a leading bishop and many lay citizens. As you would expect, I combined my work with tourist stops in that lovely country, from Dingle and Galway to Limerick and Dublin. This was journalism at its most enjoyable and exciting. Back in America, I developed a database of abusive priests from Ireland, consulted with advocates for abuse victims, perused the files of the court cases, spoke with victims and their attorneys. In both countries I read all the relevant literature. And in my earlier research in Rome for my project on bishops, I had come up with information that would relate to the relationship between the Polish pope, John Paul II, and his beloved Ireland.

From all that effort and more, I came up with some answers to my questions, including a plausible, though not conclusive, answer to the big "why" of so much abuse. I also developed fully textured profiles of some of the abusers, from boy-loving Bishop O'Connell who had never dated girls in Ireland and then found sexual satisfaction with teenage boys in America, to the pedophile priest O'Grady who had been molested by two priests in his home country and later wished that his bishops in America had stopped him from abusing dozens of girls and boys. Then there was Irish-born Behan, who was stripped of his priestly duties over abuse allegations, but who still prays daily and maintains his faith. More telling, however, were the stories of the many victims, who suffered for long their encounters with the priests, some to fight back to regain their emotional stability, if not their faith in the church.

For the Irish, it has been a tragic turn of history. According to a bestselling book, How the Irish Saved Civilization, this people of myth and mysticism saved Europe from the barbarians during the dark ages. Centuries later, thousands of Irish priests went to the United States to help preserve and spread the Catholic faith, building churches, developing an education system and serving the religious needs of the millions of immigrants who preceded them.

But now I present evidence, sadly and even reluctantly, that many priests of Irish heritage helped to cripple the church they had once built, joining in what Tony Flannery calls, in both countries, a "pedophilia paradise." Through their sexual abuse and exploitation of girls, boys and women, they smashed the idealized image, portrayed so lovingly in black-and-white Hollywood movies, of the universally "good" Irish priest. I say this with great sadness, because as a Catholic I have known and read about many truly good Irish priests, who not only tended to the needs of their parishes, but worked tirelessly for social justice and the common good, knowing how their people had suffered from injustice in years past.

I should make it clear at the outset that, while Irish priests figured prominently in the American scandals, I do not contend that they were the dominant or only major factor. Rather, I offer this account of the Irish involvement because the religion and culture of this small, heavily Catholic country can be examined closely to see why so many of its priests became sexual abusers.

As we all know, Ireland's influence in literature, the arts, and world affairs has far exceeded what could be expected from a nation so small. The tragedy is that this also is true of its impact on the scandals of the Catholic priesthood, in its role as a seedbed of abuse.