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  Cardinal Sean Brady Must Resign over His Role in Brendan Smyth Case

Colm O'Gorman
March 14, 2010

http://colmogorman.com/?p=638

IRELAND -- Given his admission that he was represented the Catholic Church at a meeting in 1975 where two child victims of serial paedophile Fr Brendan Smyth were required to swear oaths of secrecy about their abuse by Smyth, Cardinal Sean Brady must now resign.

In December 2009 Cardinal Brady told RTE that he would resign if a child had been abused as a result of a failure on his part :

"I would remember that child sex abuse is a very serious crime and very grave and if I found myself in a situation where I was aware that my failure to act had allowed or meant that other children were abused, well then, I think I would resign."

Link here.
So we know that Sean Brady was a church investigator into complaints that Smyth had abused children in 1975. By his own admission he believed the victims and believed that Smyth had abused them. But it appears he failed to report those crimes to the police or any state authority.

It seems clear that he didn't report it in 1975 or at any point over the next nineteen years. Smyth was finally arrested in 1994 after other victims of his reported their abuse to the police.

And we know Smyth continued to abuse girls and boys for many years after this gross failure by Sean Brady in his role as church representative in the 1975 investigation.

Cardinal Daly said tonight he had been following his Bishop's orders and there were no guidelines for dealing with such investigations at that time.

This is untrue.

As found by the Ferns Inquiry there was church policy setting out how such cases were to be handled.

…in 1962 Pope John XXIII issued a special procedural law for the processing of solicitation cases. The document was sent to a number of Bishops throughout the world who were directed to keep it in secret archives and not to publish or comment upon it. This document related specifically to solicitation in the course of hearing Confession. It is of interest to the Inquiry as it also specifically dealt with how priests who abused children were to be handled and imposed a high degree of secrecy on all Church officials involved in such cases. The penalty for breach of this secrecy was automatic excommunication. Even witnesses and complainants could be excommunicated if they broke the oath of secrecy.

This is the first document from the Vatican of which the Inquiry is aware which directs bishops on the handling of child abuse allegations. The code of secrecy which was emphasised in the document has been perceived by the media and members of the general public as informing the Church authorities on how allegations of child sexual abuse should be dealt with.

Page 13, The Ferns Report
The Catholic Church has repeatedly denied that this document, Crimen Sollicitationis, is not related to clerical child sexual abuse despite this finding by former Irish Supreme Court Judge Mr Justice Frank Murphy who headed the Ferns Inquiry.

Now it would appear that the requiring an oath of secrecy from victims of abuse as laid out in Crimen Sollicitationis was used in the 1975 investigation of complaints into child abuse by Smyth. And involved in the process was the man who would become Cardinal and Primate of All Ireland, Sean Brady.

Whatever his youth, experience of supposed innocence back in 1975, I do not find his defence of 'I was following orders' remotely satisfactory.

He believed that this out of control paedophile had abused children and he did nothing to report this crime to the police either then, or it would appear, at any point over the next twenty years during which Smyth continued to rape and abuse in parishes across the world with near impunity. Instead he took part in a cover up of Smyth's crimes and swore his child victims to secrecy.

Cardinal Sean Brady is now deeply personally implicated in the gross failures of the Catholic Church in the management of Smyth and his rampant sexual offending against children.

And on that basis and given his statement of December 2009 he must resign.

Below is the text of the statement issued by Cardinal Brady's office this evening.

'In 1975, Fr Sean Brady, as he then was, was the part-time secretary to the then Bishop of Kilmore, the late Bishop Francis McKiernan.

At the direction of Bishop McKiernan, Fr Brady attended two meetings: in the Dundalk meeting Fr Brady acted as recording secretary for the process involved and in the Ballyjamesduff meeting he asked the questions and recorded the answers given.

At those meetings the complainants signed undertakings, on oath, to respect the confidentiality of the information gathering process. As instructed, and as a matter of urgency, Fr Brady passed both reports to Bishop McKiernan for his immediate action.'

  
 
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