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Why protection of vulnerable children ...
By Eilis O'hanlon
Why protection of vulnerable children must always take precedence over the seal of the confessional The law extends to everyone, and priests should be no different than anyone else, writes Eilis O'Hanlon HISTORY is full of pioneers who stood up bravely against unjust laws and brought about change. Martin Luther King. Rosa Parks. The abseiling lesbians who famously stormed the House of Lords and later broke into the studio live on air as Sue Lawley read the BBC News.To that illustrious list can now be added a new name, that of Fr Gearoid O Donnchu, who last week told Newstalk that he wouldn't co-operate with new laws on the reporting of child abuse. Truly, the spirit of principled civil disobedience fostered by Mahatma Gandhi lives on. Meanwhile, back in the real world ... Fr O Donnchu was responding to the publication of the Children First Bill, which makes it mandatory for certain professions and holders of official posts to report their suspicions of child abuse to the Child and Family Agency. This includes doctors, nurses, teachers, guards, social workers, psychologists, childcare workers, as well as priests. But of course, it's the clergy who've been hogging the headlines with their concerns about the new system and its impact on the sanctity of the confessional. Speaking on Newstalk Breakfast, retired parish priest O Donnchu practically painted himself as a martyr to the cause, telling Chris O'Donoghue: "The seal of confession takes precedence over everything – even my own safety." In his own mind, no doubt he was the heir to Montgomery Clift in Hitchcock's I Confess, who was willing to stand trial for a murder he didn't commit rather than tell the police that the real killer had admitted all in the confession box. To the rest of us, he just came across as a man who needs to rethink his priorities. What he should have said was that "the seal of confession takes precedence over everything – even the safety of vulnerable children". Because they're the only ones at risk here. A priest's own safety is unlikely to be compromised even if he does keep schtumm when the local paedophile includes him in the web of culpability. Firstly, because most child abusers get away with it, meaning the complicity of related individuals never comes to light. Secondly, because even if the abuse does come out, the new legislation has been so watered down that it doesn't even include any sanctions for those who break the new rules. The Catholic church is trying to pretend this is a hugely complex moral issue, but it really isn't. It's about making clear that the law extends to everyone without exception, and that priests are no different to or better than anyone else. It's also about removing any confusion about what should be done in cases where child abuse is suspected. Everyone who deals with children now knows what to do when they have suspicions, and can't claim ignorance afterwards. Instead of accepting that the game is up, the clergy insist on playing the victim. Archbishop Diarmuid Martin even used his Holy Thursday homily in the Pro Cathedral to complain that many priests were "hurt" by a cartoon by Martyn Turner in the Irish Times which showed three priests looking at the legislation and singing a variation of the Meat Loaf song with the new words: "I'd do anything for children (but I won't do that)" – ie report child abuse. There were equally outraged letters on the matter from priests over the following days. Ironically, the cartoon used almost exactly the same words that Fr O Donnchu himself used, when he said: "I would do anything I could to protect a child – but not to break the seal of confession." Strangely enough, though, there were no outraged homilies or letters in the Irish Times from Catholics complaining about that. "I would do anything I could to protect a child" is a sentence that should never be followed by a "but". A "but" renders the statement meaningless. What annoys priests is that we've finally decided, as a society, to stop giving them special treatment and instead to treat the confession for what it is – a private religious fetish which has no more legal standing than the rules of the Tufty Club. If recent history had shown the church to be morally trustworthy, it might be easier to argue that they should get exceptions, but we tried the Catholic church's way and it didn't work. It did the opposite of work. The Catholic way not only allowed the abuse of children to continue, it made it easier for that abuse to snowball. It takes some cheek for the church to still present the confessional as an inviolable and holy place separate from the outside world. As John Cornwell argues powerfully in his recent book The Dark Box: A Secret History Of Confession, it has been an enabler and facilitator of sexual abuse from the days of Chaucer's corrupt Friar Huberd, who used confession to seduce young women, right up to the present day where, Cornwell argues, the extension of confession by Pope Pius X to pre-pubescents opened up generations of children to predatory paedophiles who now had the opportunity to identity and groom possible victims. Much of the book makes painful reading. The Ryan Report tells of one victim who finally found the courage to tell another priest in confession what had happened to him. He was then assaulted and raped by the new priest as well. The Cloyne Report details how even when priests discovered, outside the confessional, that other priests had committed offences against children, they still didn't reveal it to the proper authorities because they felt these allegations had "the character of a confession" and were, therefore, under the "seal". How convenient. Concentrating on the supposed sanctity of the confessional just detracts from the real victims, who are children, and instead makes a melodrama out of the moral dilemmas of a small group of people who, as a group, did not exactly cover themselves in glory when it came to protecting children in the past and can't be expected to be given another chance to do the right thing off their own bat. If, like Fr O Donnchu, they decide to defy the law, then they are perfectly entitled to do so, just as journalists can defy the courts and refuse to reveal their sources The difference is that when journalists refuse to do so, they face severe penalties under law, whereas priests will face absolutely none under the new Children First Bill. That's the real cause of concern. Those who refuse to co-operate with best practice on child protection shouldn't be allowed to be in influential positions over children at all.
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