Brady, Your Lame Apology Simply Adds Insult to Injury Unless You Quit

The Herald
May 9, 2012

http://www.herald.ie/opinion/columnists/gerry-ocarroll/brady-your-lame-apology-simply-adds-insult-to-injury-unless-you-quit-3103332.html

SO, Sean Brady is finally sorry.

That's all very well, but what I want to hear is a resignation, not an apology.

But, despite widespread unease, disgust and anger at the way he handled complaints of abuse against paedophile Brendan Smyth, Cardinal Brady remains in situ.

The cleric clearly has no intention of throwing in the towel and going quietly into retirement -- as anyone with half an ounce of common sense would do.

In fact, Brady's only response to the tidal wave of calls for his resignation has been a belated, anodyne apology to Brendan Boland, one of the victims of the notorious serial paedophile Smyth.

Back in 1975, Brendan Boland was 14-year-old child abuse victim. Sean Brady was a 36-year-old priest, one of three churchmen appointed to conduct an inquiry into the child abuse carried out by Smyth.

Brady, despite believing the testimony of child witnesses who were sworn to secrecy, failed to alert the police or the parents of four other children also being abused by Smyth.

His pathetic defence is that he passed on the information to his superiors and acted correctly in doing only that.

Does this cardinal really expect us to believe that, as an up-and-coming career cleric, he was merely a note-taker at this inquiry? Brady cannot hide behind a Nuremberg-style defence, that he was acting under orders.

As a human being, he had a moral duty to report a crime. He did not and now he cannot wash his hands of the consequences.

How can this man sleep, even at a interval of more than 30 years, knowing that Smyth continued to abuse victims.

He may, as his Vatican overlords proclaim, have acted correctly, but he did not act correctly according to civil law, or correctly according to any right-thinking person's conscience.

His apology this week is, therefore, worthless. It adds insult to injury.

Sean Brady has lost the confidence and the moral authority to remain on as a spiritual leader of this country's Catholic population.

Our Tanaiste, Eamon Gilmore, among many other senior public figures, has called on this man to go.

Mind you, Taoiseach Enda Kenny, who has stood up to the Vatican in the past, has not forthrightly echoed this. Why not? Surely as Taoiseach he should express a clear opinion on the matter? It appears that Sean Brady may not be the only person lacking a backbone in this instance.

What matter? It's clear that no earthly power can shift the cardinal at this stage.

Apology over, Brady now clearly intends to brazen it out to the last.

Despite this, he must surely realise that the Irish people are sick to their stomach of a culture of prevarication, shameless buck-passing and legalese, all of which allowed a paedophile like Brendan Smyth go on abusing.

Sean Brady is a poster boy for all that is wrong in the Catholic Church in Ireland. He should go and go now.

But I won't hold my breath.