Eilis O'hanlon: Usual Suspects Bay for "Ignorant" Cleric's Blood

Irish Independent
September 9, 2012

http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/eilis-ohanlon-usual-suspects-bay-for-ignorant-clerics-blood-3223573.html

Think of it as the Irish bishops' raffle. Every month they all put their names into a hat, then whoever's name is drawn out has to say something incredibly stupid to draw the ire of the anti-Catholic brigade and take the heat off the rest for a while.

This week's losing raffle ticket belonged to Bishop John Kirby of Clonfert who, in the course of apologising for moving two paedophile priests to different parishes in the Nineties where they went on to abuse further victims, tried to explain his decision by saying in retrospect: "I saw it as a friendship that crossed a boundary line."

His words naturally provoked howls of protest, not only from victims of clerical abuse, who have every right to be outraged, but also from a host of the usual suspects who really should try harder to conceal their glee at fixing another Catholic priest in the firing line lest it start to look as if they're enjoying the blood sport too much. They wanted Bishop Kirby to resign. They wanted him censured. Some even wanted him sent to jail. How, they demanded to know, could a bishop fail to understand the difference between child abuse and an inappropriate friendship?

The short answer is: of course he knows the difference. He's not an idiot. When he spoke to Galway Bay FM about the cases in Clonfert which have been brought to light by the internal audit into the handling of child abuse recently carried out by the National Board for Safeguarding Children, that's exactly what he was talking about: the two specific cases which came to his attention during the period in question: "I literally thought ... that if I separated the priest and the youngster, that it was a friendship that crossed the boundary line. I literally thought if I separated them I would have solved the problem. I have learnt sadly since that it was a very different experience."

Condemn him for that, he probably deserves it, but there was no need to deliberately misinterpret his words to make them sound worse than they were. Once the game of Chinese whispers began, many of his fiercest opponents actually seemed to convince themselves that the bishop was suggesting child sexual abuse itself was nothing more than friendship gone a bit awry, an opinion so deranged that anyone who seriously did suggest it should face a one-way trip to a padded cell, never mind jail.

There was a similar campaign against Mary Kenny a few months ago when she said that, in cases of child abuse, she always wanted to know more details in order to understand exactly what was being discussed, since there is no single definition of abuse and categories can range from isolated acts of touching to repeated incidences of rape. The Clonfert controversy is surely one occasion where it would help enormously to know what the two priests in question actually did, in order to understand better what shaped Bishop Kirby's thoughts at the time; but of course we don't ask and we don't pry, out of a proper sensitivity to victims, and thus we have nothing to go on except the decontextualised comments of one man years later.

Maybe that doesn't matter. Out of context or not, he still made those crass and ludicrous comments, and can hardly complain now if asked to justify them. He'll certainly have a hard job doing so. Cardinal Sean Brady was straining at the borders of credibility when he said he hadn't understood the nature of child sexual abuse in the Seventies when he took part in the silencing of child victims of Fr Brendan Smyth. Bishop Kirby has crashed through the border and blundered into Alice In Wonderland territory with his claim that he still didn't understand much about child abuse in the Nineties.

The best that can be said for him is that he was ignorant, in fact John Kirby used that word about himself, though he did soften the edge of self-blame by also describing his mindset as one of "innocence and naivete", thereby making his lack of understanding sound almost charming and otherworldy. It won't wash.

Parish priests can be excused for being away with the fairies, but a bishop has a duty to understand fully the matters that come before him, not least one who had, as the new report into his handling of these two cases makes clear, taken a decision "to manage things himself" in the diocese.

Even if there were, as he points out, no guidelines in place to instruct a bishop how to behave in such circumstances, that simply puts the onus more firmly on the man in the big hat to do the right thing when required; and if he doesn't, he must expect to be held accountable.

All the same, it does need to be stressed, before the Chinese whispers get going again, that, for all his mistakes, Bishop Kirby was never involved in the bullying or silencing of victims or in covering up abuse.

The report by the National Board for Safeguarding Children states clearly that Kirby acted "immediately" in 1990 when told about the activities of so-called Priest A, confronted the man personally, and within three days made a "speedy report" of the allegations to the Western Health Board.

Bishop Kirby allowed the impression to be created that the Catholic hierarchy has learnt nothing from its mistakes and is still in denial about child abuse. That couldn't be further from the truth. The report actually commends the dioceses of Cork and Ross, Kildare and Leighlin, and Limerick for many of the measures to safeguard children now in place, but who noticed or cared about that amid the white noise of controversy? Whatever Bishop Kirby does in the future, a career in corporate PR is clearly not in the offing.