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	Cloyne's " Country" Bishop By Kristine Ward National Survivor Advocates Coalito July 14, 2011 http://nationalsurvivoradvocatescoalition.wordpress.com/editorials/ The Cloyne Report, formally known as the Republic of Ireland's Department of Justice and Equality's Report by Commission of Investigation into the Catholic Diocese of Cloyne, was released yesterday. It follows the Ferns, Murphy (Dublin diocese) and Ryan reports. All of the reports are horrendous in their revelations of abuse and cover-up and Cloyne is indeed damning but Cloyne's not to be missed special ingredient is a bishop who lived and worked at the highest circle of the Vatican for 12 years. Cloyne's Bishop John Magee was the private secretary to Pope Paul VI, Pope John Paul I, and Pope John Paul II from 1975-1982. From 1982 to 1987 he served as the papal Master of Ceremonies. He begins his tenure in Cloyne in 1987 and resigned as Bishop of Cloyne on March 25, 2010 following the Murphy report. The position of private secretary to a pope isn't filled by a volunteer walking up to St. Ann's Gate at the edge of the Vatican whispering to a Swiss Guard that he's available for work And nobody stays a private secretary or a Master of Ceremonies for a pope without the boss' backing. A dozen years, the time stretch from first grade to becoming a high school graduate, makes for a long spell of education in Vatican ways particularly with the seminars led by the head honchos. In addition to these graduate level training years, Bishop Magee informed the Commission all told he spent 24 years in Rome. The man who was responsible for the Cloyne Diocese is indeed an inside player. Make no mistake about it. Here are two clips from the Cloyne Report to give our readers a picture of Bishop Magee: The report says,"It is a remarkable fact that Bishop Magee took little or no active interest in the management of clerical child sexual abuse cases until 2008, 12 years after the Framework Document was adopted. As a result of this vacuum, the diocese's functions in the matter of clerical child sexual abuse were, by default, exercised by others. The principal person involved was Monsignor O'Callaghan. He did not approve of the procedures set out in the Framework Document. In particular, he did not approve of the requirement to report to the civil authorities." And the report says,"In evidence to the Commission, Bishop Magee said that he was fully committed to the implementation of the Framework Document and was shocked to discover in 2008 that it was not being implemented. The Commission considers that this response is totally inadequate. It became clear during the course of this investigation that Bishop Magee had, to a certain extent, detached himself from the day to day management of child sexual abuse cases. Bishop Magee was the head of the diocese and cannot avoid his responsibility by blaming subordinates whom he wholly failed to supervise." These two sections of the 400 page report lift the curtain on how this inside player designed plausible denial for himself: installing Monsignor O'Callaghan, (a person whom the report says kept the files on abusive priests in his home), as the gatekeeper for the handling of abuse reports and the decider of action and inaction. This plausible denial platform sets the stage for Bishop Magee's "shock" that the Irish bishops' own answer to dealing with the abuse crisis was not implemented in the Diocese of Cloyne. The Cloyne Report tells us that Bishop Magee lied to the Health Service Executive (HSE) that allegations of abuse were being reported to the police. In the United States, Catholics are used to hearing the bishops and their agents frame the abuse crisis as something that happened long ago in a galaxy far, far away when a few bad apples got caught up in the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The Cloyne Report says the Commission "examined complaints, allegations, concerns and suspicions of child sexual abuse made to the diocese, other Catholic Church authorities and public and State authorities from January 1, 1996 through February 1, 2009." No need to re-read the last sentence, you have read correctly 1996 – 2009. This is not a report about yesteryear. This is a report about today. The Diocese of Cloyne is in north and east County Cork. It has 46 parishes and the report says that of the 163 clerics listed in the diocese's directory for 1996, there have been "allegations made or concerns expressed" about 7.6 % of its priests. Register that number against the 1% that the United States Bishops insisted was the correct percentage for abusive priests until it wasn't. With the John Jay studies, the admitted to figure by the US bishops climbed to 4%. Other studies put it closer to 10%. As was true with the Archdiocese of Boston that there was nothing in the baked beans or the Charles River that caused the eruption of sexual abuse by priests and segregated the scandal to the confines of the archdiocese's borders, neither is there anything in the geography or the Guinness in north and east County Cork that would put a label of aberration on what the Irish Commission found. The Cloyne Report tells us that the actors in this cover-up, this favoritism of cleric over child, this lying to police did so against the backdrop of following what was happening in North America vis a vis clerical child sexual abuse. Says Monsignor O'Callaghan, (the same Monsignor O'Callaghan who doesn't inform the police of allegations in Cloyne), "I'd say in the 1990s it dawned on us we better get us to speed on this because also another factor, a lot of the priests who were being accused of sex abuse were Irish. A lot of them had been ordained in Ireland and therefore all you had to do was look over the names on the list anywhere and you got that picture, so I suppose that certainly struck us at that stage, it did." In the report, Monsignor O'Callaghan describes Cloyne in a self deprecating fashion as a "country" diocese. It is duplicitous. No country bumpkins are these two: bishop and aide. They knew exactly what they were doing. The Cloyne Report is another piece in the growing global evidence of the depth and breadth of the sexual abuse scandal in the Church. It is not knowledge that was freely given to the faithful by those who claim to lead in the Church. It is knowledge dragged from the Church through the force of a civil government investigation. The only way we have found out what they were doing is through the courage, persistence, pain, sorrow, and scars of the survivors and their families. Let us not forget that it was a 15 year campaign waged by the survivors that persuaded the government of the Republic of Ireland to investigate sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church. They are owed respect and deliberate action not another insulting round of insipid apologies from the Church. And certainly the first who should lay down the yawn inducing, meaningless apologies are those who claim apostolic succession. As the truth continues to be revealed through truly independent investigations, we continue to see succession, yes, but apostolic? Not so much.
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