BishopAccountability.org
	Irish Report Finds Abuse Persisting in Catholic Church By Rachel Donadio and Nicholas Kulish New York Times July 13, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/14/world/europe/14church.html?_r=1 The Roman Catholic Church in Ireland was covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests as recently as 2009, long after it issued guidelines meant to protect children, and the Vatican tacitly encouraged the cover-up by ignoring the guidelines, according to a scathing report issued Wednesday by the Irish government. Alan Shatter, the Irish justice minister, called the findings “truly scandalous,” adding that the church’s earlier promises to report all abuse cases since 1995 to civil authorities were “built on sand.” Abuse victims called the report more evidence that the church sought to protect priests rather than children. In Germany on Wednesday, the country’s Roman Catholic bishops took new steps to bring previously unreported abuse to light. The German bishops said they would allow outside investigators to look for abuse cases in diocesan personnel records dating back at least 10 years, and in some cases all the way to 1945, though there were indications that some crucial records may have already been destroyed. In both Germany and Ireland, the abuse scandal has touched the highest echelons of the church. The new developments showed the tensions between civil and ecclesiastical justice in a crisis that has shaken the church’s moral authority worldwide. The Irish report in particular revealed a complex tug of war between the Irish church and the Vatican over how to handle abuse, with a fine line between confusion and obstruction. The Cloyne Report, as it is known, drafted by an independent investigative committee headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, found that the clergy in the Diocese of Cloyne, a rural area of County Cork, did not act on complaints against 19 priests from 1996 to 2009. The report also found that two allegations against one priest were reported to the police, but that there was no evidence of any subsequent inquiry. John Magee, the bishop of Cloyne since 1987, who had previously served as private secretary to three popes, resigned last year. In a statement on Wednesday, Bishop Magee offered a “sincere apology,” but he did not accept direct responsibility for covering up the abuse. “While I was fully supportive of the procedures, I now realize that I should have taken a much firmer role in ensuring their implementation,” Bishop Magee said. “I accept in its entirety the commission’s view that the primary responsibility for the failure to fully implement the church procedures in the diocese lay with me.” The Cloyne Report is the Irish government’s fourth in recent years on aspects of the scandal. It shows that abuses were still occurring and being covered up 13 years after the church in Ireland issued child protection guidelines in 1996, and that civil officials were failing to investigate allegations. The report warned that other dioceses might have similar failings. “That’s the most horrifying aspect of this document,” Frances Fitzgerald, Ireland’s minister for children, told a news conference on Wednesday. “This is not a catalogue of failure from a different era — this is about Ireland now.” Most damaging, the report said that the Congregation for the Clergy, an arm of the Vatican that oversees the priesthood, had not recognized the 1996 guidelines. That “effectively gave individual Irish bishops the freedom to ignore the procedures” and “gave comfort and support” to priests who “dissented from the stated Irish church policy,” the report said. The report gave details of a confidential letter sent in 1997 by the Vatican’s nuncio, or ambassador, in Ireland to Irish bishops, warning them that their child-protection policies violated canon law, which states that priests accused of abuse should be able to appeal their cases to the Vatican. The nuncio also dismissed the Irish guidelines as “a study document.” The Cloyne Report said that Cardinal Sean Brady, the senior bishop in Ireland, defended Bishop Magee after he was accused of improper behavior. The report found that Bishop Magee had held a would-be seminarian in an embrace for a minute, kissing him on the forehead and asking if the embrace “felt good.” When the man filed a complaint to the diocese, the report said, he was told that the embrace was an “Italianate gesture” the bishop had picked up living in Rome, and that while it was perhaps inappropriate, it did not merit reporting to the Vatican. Cardinal Brady issued an apology on Wednesday and called for more openness and cooperation with civil authorities. He has been fighting calls for his resignation since last year, when he acknowledged helping to conceal the crimes of one serial-rapist priest from Irish authorities in the mid-1970s. The Vatican spokesman, the Rev. Federico Lombardi, said Wednesday that the Vatican had no comment on the Cloyne Report. The Irish government has often met resistance from Vatican officials, who declined to provide documents without going through regular diplomatic channels. Bishop Accountability, a group that monitors sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, called the Cloyne Report “eerily similar” to a report by the district attorney of Philadelphia, which found that church officials did not report allegations of abuse to civil authorities, resulting in the indictment in February of a priest on charges of child abuse. In both cases, church officials “showed a brazen disregard for both civil law and the church’s own internal policies,” the group said. It added that the Cloyne Report was “disheartening confirmation that even today, despite the church’s knowledge of the profound anguish of thousands of victims, its reform policies are public relations ploys, not true child protection programs.” Irish police officials said they would see whether further action could be taken against priests identified in the new report. Mr. Shatter, the justice minister, pledged Wednesday to introduce new laws making it a criminal offense to withhold knowledge of child abuse from authorities. After a 2009 report found that thousands of children were abused in state-run Catholic boarding schools from the 1930s to the 1990s, the Irish government paid hundreds of millions of euros in compensation to the victims. One in Four, an organization of Irish abuse victims, said that the new report “documents a familiar saga of priests sexually abusing children with impunity, protected by senior churchmen conspiring to cover up the abuse with an astounding indifference to the safety of children.” In Germany, the Catholic Church’s decision to open its personnel files was an effort to restore some of the public trust in the church that the scandals have eroded. Record numbers of Catholics left the church in Germany last year after hundreds of cases of previously unreported child abuse came to light, including a case of a priest with a history of molesting boys who was returned to pastoral duties by the archbishop of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The priest was later convicted of molesting more boys. Bishop Stephan Ackermann of Trier, assigned by the German church to lead its response, told reporters in Bonn on Wednesday that the church’s goal was to go beyond the cases it already knew about. “We also want to discover the truth that potentially lies undiscovered in the files of past decades,” Bishop Ackermann said. The Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony said it would hire retired prosecutors and judges to supervise church workers as they examine personnel files for signs of abuse. If indications of abuse are found, investigators will try to contact the possible victims to follow up.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.