By Michael O'Regan
Irish Times
March 21, 2010
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0321/breaking6.html
IRELAND -- Clerical abuse survivor Andrew Madden yesterday reiterated his call for the resignation of Pope Benedict and Cardinal Seán Brady after studying the Papal pastoral letter.
Expressing disappointment with the document, he said: "It changes nothing. They should both resign."
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| Abuse victim Andrew Madden at the Fine Gael national conference in Killarney yesterday. Photo by Brenda Fitzsimons |
Mr Madden said that the document represented "not an inability to do the right thing, but an unwillingness to do the right thing". He did not feel that the pope would be any more willing to do it on a visit to Ireland than in Rome.
Mr Madden was speaking to journalists in Killarney yesterday where he was addressing the Fine Gael national conference on the theme "cherishing our children".
He said that a major problem with the pastoral letter was the pope's failure to accept the cover-up of clerical sex abuse.
"The whole Murphy report was about the cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests in this country for three decades," he said.
"For the Pope not to acknowledge the cover-up, and the part that Irish bishops and the Vatican played in it, is really just not on.
"Obviously, if we are going to respond in any meaningful way to the Murphy report, in particular, and the Ferns report, because it revealed the same thing...that ought to have been addressed."
Dismissing the suggestion that the Papal document was part of a process, Mr Madden said that approach was "buying time, moving things out."
He said that when the Irish bishops went to Rome there were great expectations that something useful would come out of that meeting. Instead, he added, the bishops had said at the time that people should wait for the pope's letter.
"They beefed up that quite a lot, as if this was going to be the thing," he added.
Speaking separately at the Fine Gael conference, the party's spokesman on children Alan Shatter described the pope's "silence" on the issue of abuse victims being sworn to secrecy by the church as "surprising and disturbing".
He said a new criminal offence should be introduced "which expressly applies to the concealment of information about child abuse, both past and present, and to the administration of any oath obliging any individual to conceal such conduct from either An Garda Síochána or our child care services."
Mr Shatter said it was not acceptable that the Vatican used its ecclesiastical authority to interfere in the Republic's internal affairs and also invoke diplomatic protocol when it suited it to withhold information from a Government-appointed commission investigating allegations of clerical abuse.
"Nor is it acceptable that the Vatican refuses to permit its ambassador, in the guise of the Papal Nuncio, to co-operate with such a commission or to attend at a parliamentary committee meeting requested by members of the sovereign parliament of this State to discuss these issues," he added.
At the very minimum, he added, he expected that the Pope would have pledged that the Vatican would now fully co-operate with, and make all requested information available, to the Murphy commission in its ongoing investigation into other dioceses that might take place.
"I also expected an announcement that the Papal Nuncio would now accept the request previously rejected to meet with the Oireachtas foreign affairs committee to discuss these important issues," he added.
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