By Justine McCarthy
Sunday Times
March 21, 2010
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/ireland/article7069703.ece
IRELAND -- The echoing cloisters of Holy Trinity abbey would have been a daunting place for a child summoned to describe to one priest how another priest, Fr Brendan Smyth, had molested him.
Yet, last week, it was the youth and subordinate role of the then 36-year-old Fr Sean Brady, the child's questioner, that was cited to defend his procurement on that day in 1975 of the youngster's signature to an oath of silence on the abuse. Some would argue it was a classic example of the paedophile injunction "let this be our little secret".
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| Cardinal Sean Brady |
But elsewhere in the abbey, another priest, five years younger than Brady, remained undeterred by his own junior ranking. Fr Bruno Mulvihill was already embarked on a mission that would culminate in his estrangement from his fellow Norbertines, order and virtual exile from his homeland.
The previous summer, Mulvihill, a Galway-born ancient classics scholar aged 29 at that time, had boldly approached the papal nuncio, Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, during celebrations for the order's 15 years at the abbey at Kilnacrott, near Ballyjamesduff in Cavan. He warned Alibrandi, formerly the personal secretary of Pope Paul VI, about an "impending scandal of unforeseeable dimensions" concerning Smyth.
The nuncio refused to intervene. After mass, Mulvihill sought out James McKiernan, the bishop of Kilmore, and repeated the warning. The bishop also seemed uninterested.
The young priest did not give up. On November 1, 1974, he wrote letters to both men, telling them again that Smyth's activities were going to explode in a scandal. Looking back, he traced his first intimations of it to "peculiar" noises he heard coming from the sacristy one day in 1964, when he was a 19-year-old novice.
Four years later, the pieces began to fit together when, working as the abbot's secretary, he took a telephone message from the bishop of Providence, Rhode Island, America. The message, Mulvihill told journalist Chris Moore nearly three decades later for his book on the affair, Betrayal of Trust, was that the American bishop had put Smyth on a plane back to Ireland in disgrace after discovering he had been sexually abusing children in his diocese.
On June 8, 1995, Mulvihill returned to Ireland from Germany, where he had been transferred, and made a formal statement to gardai about his knowledge of Smyth's crimes. He told them that at Holy Trinity abbey he had found a document from the Congregation of Religious in Rome rescinding Smyth's confessional faculties and forbidding him to leave the abbey unaccompanied, an implementation of the wishes of the abbey's local bishop.
The two young priests Muvilhill and Brady followed different paths thereafter. Mulvihill left the priesthood, taking a job with American Express in Munich, then in 1999, joining Gulliver's, a fledgling travel agency in Wuppertal. He died in a car crash on August 26, 2004, aged 59.
Brady, then McKiernan's part-time secretary, and a full-time teacher at St Patrick's college in Cavan, was assigned as a canon lawyer to "ecclesiastical proceedings" held on Smyth in 1975, following formal complaints about the priest.
At the first meeting in a Franciscan friary in Dundalk on March 29, Brady, one of three canon lawyers present, acted as the recorder. The boy, an altar server whom Smyth abused at the age of 10, was accompanied by his father. The canonical court accepted he was telling the truth and he was given a verbal apology at the meeting.
At the second session, held at the abbey, concerning allegations that Smyth had abused another young boy, Brady acted alone as interviewer and recorder. His subsequent recommendations to McKiernan have not been published but, whatever they were, the bishop did not use the strictest sanction available — laicisation [(defrocking]).
In contrast to the canonical tribunals set up in the Ferns diocese in county Wexford following Judge Frank Murphy's 2005 report, and which led to priests being defrocked for sexually abusing children, Smyth was let loose to continue his 40-year crime spree.
Last week, someone representing themselves as a relative of one of the abused boys sent a text message to LMFM radio station conveying the family's distress at learning 35 years later about the many children, possibly more than 100, whom Smyth abused after the canonical court was held.
One of those victims was "Samantha" whom Smyth targeted as a schoolgirl at her boarding school. Samantha is a pseudonym for a middle-aged mother who has never had the heart to tell her mother what the priest did to her. It was Samantha who petitioned the present abbot at Holy Trinity abbey, Fr Gerard Cusack, to remove the word "Rev" from Smyth's headstone in the abbey grounds where he was buried after suffering a heart attack in the Curragh prison in Co Kildare, in 1997, the first year of a 12-year sentence for abusing 20 children.
Smyth used to visit the parlour at the boarding school on Sundays. The nuns, in all innocence Samantha believes, would line up the girls in the corridor and he would take his pick. After raping them, he photographed them. Asked if he looked as demonic then as he does in the film footage of him being taken to jail, she replies: "Oh, yes. Not in public, but once the door shut behind you, that's exactly how he looked."
Samantha knew of two of Smyth's victims who took their own lives.
Last week, the Norbertines issued a statement admitting the order's guilt in allowing Smyth access to children and professing itself dedicated to making amends. So far, it has "made restitution" to 42 of his victims and helped others with counselling.
After his involvement in the Smyth case, Brady moved to Rome as vice-rector in 1980, then rector of the Irish College. He was back in Ireland in in 1993, first as parish priest of Castletara, then, from December 1994, as coadjutor archbishop of Armagh. When Cardinal Cahal Daly retired in October 1996, Brady succeeded him as archbishop of Armagh and primate of Ireland.
By then, Marcus McKeown was the youth director of the Armagh diocese. The 23-year-old theology graduate from Dundalk had been appointed in May 1996, four months before he got married. His job was to organise masses and retreats for young people. "I believe I was the first lay person appointed youth director in any diocese," he said. "It was one of the best times of my life."
His happiness began to unravel when his marriage failed after two years. "I met another girl very soon after my marriage ended but I was told by the priest I reported to that I had to end the relationship. I refused," McKeown said.
"He reported it to the archbishop and I had to go and see him in June 1999. He said he'd got a report that the girl I was seeing had come on a retreat with me. He said I was still married in the eyes of the church and I couldn't be up on the altar telling young people about their faith if I wasn't celibate.
"He said, 'you either agree to be single and celibate, or it's your job.' I said I couldn't give that undertaking. I was 27.
"That day, my job ended in the bishop's palace in Armagh. I got three months' salary and I had to go to a solicitor's office to sign a confidentiality agreement. Within six months, I'd lost my wife, my home, my faith, my church and my job."
McKeown, whose marriage was annulled by a church tribunal nine years later, believes he has a responsibility to break his silence, due to the irony of Brady objecting to McKeown's lack of celibacy.
"I'm not out to cause trouble for anyone but the fact remains that I lost my job because I wouldn't agree to remain single and celibate," he said.
A spokesman for Brady said: "Cardinal Brady is absolutely clear that neither he nor any official of the diocese asked for a commitment to remain celibate."
In her report on the Dublin archdiocese last November, Judge Yvonne Murphy dismantled the church's defence that it did not understand child abuse in the 1970s. "The controversy and drama surrounding the Fr Brendan Smyth case in 1994 brought clerical child sexual abuse to public attention," she wrote.
"The claim that bishops and senior church officials were on 'a learning curve' about child sexual abuse rings hollow when it is clear that cases were dealt with by Archbishop McQuaid in the 1950s and 1960s."
Brady may be given breathing space after his public act of contrition on St Patrick's Day, and the Irish church may get solace from the pope's letter this weekend. But more trouble is brewing. The Murphy commission's report on the mishandling of complaints of child sexual abuse in Cloyne diocese is due to be completed by early summer. A secret canonical court relating to Father B, a subject of the commission's investigations, began at the Nano Nagle Centre near Mallow in Co Cork last year but was suspended at the behest of abuse survivors until Murphy's report is published.
The secrecy demanded by the church is not confined to long past history. In March 2006, Peter McCloskey, 37, who was sexually abused by a Limerick priest when he was an altar boy, was required to sign a confidentiality agreement at a meeting with diocesan representatives, as were his brother, Joseph McCloskey, and a member of One in Four, the advocacy group.
Following Peter's suicide two days after the meeting, his brother repeatedly requested that the diocese relieve him of the confidentiality. A request that was made in vain.
Abbot's character reference for rapist
Fr Kevin Smith, who resigned as lord abbot of the Norbertines at Holy Trinity abbey at Kilnacrott after confessing that he failed to ensure children were safe from Fr Brendan Smyth, gave a character reference in court two years ago for a convicted child rapist, writes Justine McCarthy.
Six months after the case, the man raped again. This time his victim was an 86-year-old woman with Alzheimer's disease.
Simon McGinley, originally from Dundalk, was sentenced to 12 years' imprisonment in 1998 for raping the 13-year-old girl at the centre of the C case which provoked a national abortion debate. He served just five years and was released in 2003.
On January 22, 2008 he appeared in Monaghan district court on three drink-driving charges, threatening and abusive behaviour towards a garda, public intoxication, and the theft of 15 bottles of Miller beer worth €19.
A character reference from Smith (then 77) was handed to the judge in advance of McGinley's sentencing. McGinley was given a three-month suspended jail term and fines totalling €450. He was also disqualified from driving for three years. Six months later, on June 16, 2008, he entered the elderly woman's home and raped her. He was sentenced to 21 years in jail after a nine-day trial last May.
At the time of giving a reference for McGinley, Smith described himself as an abbot, even though he had relinquished the position on October 23, 1994, shortly before Albert Reynolds's government collapsed over the state's role in the Smyth scandal.
At that time, Smith acknowledged that Smyth's "problem" with children emerged soon after ordination in 1951 and that the order had dealt with it by "frequently" transferring him from place to place. He had been Smyth's superior for 25 years, including in 1975 when the then Fr Sean Brady participated in the secret "canonical proceedings" at which two children were compelled to sign oaths of secrecy.
Smith continues to celebrate mass in diocesan churches as a relief priest.
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